When daughter had her unscheduled trip in a helicopter earlier this year, she and her colleagues were forced to abandon some mountaineering gear in the blizzard. She’d noted down the grid reference from a GPS gizmo that one of the others had with him, and I’d promised to take her back to the area. When I managed to borrow a GPS gizmo from a colleague at work and we heard a brilliant weather forecast, everything seemed set.

The weather forecast proved accurate: it was a beautiful spring day; and we got to within a hundred metres or so of the destination by old fashioned map and compass. The borrowed GPS gizmo took us to the burial site, where daughter was able to excavate all her lost kit. She discovered later that there’s still one crampon left there belonging to one of the others – if any Geocachers happen to read this and fancy a dig at NN 62431 40643, please drop me an email if you find it!

This experience shows the strengths and weaknesses of hi-tech in the Scottish mountains. GPS meant that Nicky’s party should have been able to tell the Mountain Rescue exactly where they were – but there was limited mobile phone coverage, and the one text message that got through wasn’t read in time. They had already lost their map in gale force winds and blizzard conditions.

In today’s beautiful spring weather, GPS took us straight to their overnight bivvy site – just a couple of minutes’ away from the easy path down to the car park half an hour’s walk away. It looks so easy to program a series of waypoints into a hi-tech device and assume you can go anywhere in any conditions. The reality in the Scottish mountains can be quite different- especially in winter.

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