...just wait until the time you know exactly where you are, but the map and road is all wrong...it happens navigating using a Delorme or a 15 minute map instead of a 7.5 or an actual USFS/BLM map. Green trails too, or an old datum map....you can find roads that were roads like the maps show, just fifty years ago.
nothing like finding bridges washed away, etc, from a road that 'goes' in the Gazatteer.
Getting 'lost' is relative and scrumptous in its possibility; also potentially dangerous.
(The first time I remember truly being lost i was 9 or 10 years old. I walked in a circle, in the woods, in the rain, and realized I was lost, by finding a stump i had passed 15 minutes earlier. I hid out in the stump hollow out of the rain, collected my wits, and 'dead reckoned' out of there by lining tree trunks up three in a row and walking the line out of the woods....)
but getting lost on a bike usually only involves a long detour and things you wouldn't ordinarily have seen or planned for....
lost in the woods on bikes on FS roads is a different matter entirely- I've got a tattoo of a map as a remberance of a particularily heinous 'getting lost' MTB episode fifteen years ago.
GPS is a funny thing. I have never owned one. Was up on a Mountain Rescue search a few years ago, a body recovery, on Mount Adams. We were descending and spotted some lightning strikes across the 'scape start a few fires. We call them into base, and got asked for position.
the kids with the GPS were busy powering up and ascertaining satellites while us old farts extrapolated the point by shooting a compass bearing and using a quad sheet.
We called in the fires' location before the GPS users even aquired our position.
Last edited by Bekologist; 05-09-06 at 11:00 PM.