A desert hike through Joshua Tree with high tech

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Going solo into the backcountry -- or on a sailboat around Catalina, or on a mountain bike in Moab, Utah, for that matter -- always implies a trade-off, the exchange of safety for reverie. Nearly always, the risk is worth it, and for all the reasons Emerson made a career of. To be alone in big-N nature is to challenge yourself, to calibrate yourself, to fully inhabit the body you were born with, to feel the chill of the absolute run up your spine.

To navigate 75 miles of gorgeous but punishing chaparral, I've brought along a Garmin Colorado 400t GPS unit, with which I've electronically marked the water caches I buried earlier in the week while driving across the park. If I fail to find even one of these caches, I will wind up very miserable or worse. Also on my utility belt is an ACR Microfix 406 Personal Locator Beacon. Essentially one big panic button, when activated the unit sends a signal to a station monitored by the Air Force, which in turn mobilizes search-and-rescue resources.
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