First of all let me say that technology can be wonderful when it comes to safety items like the one Grizzly Wulff talks about in his recent thread. I suspect that I, as a field-going federal employee, will be required to have something like this on my person 24/7 shortly after some bureaucrat back east decides that it is a good idea. Oh, sorry, you have to have this but it comes out of your project budget. 40,000 employees times $200 is...

Whatever happened to being responsible for ourselves? When I was a kid, I would holler at my mom "I'm going hunting (or fishing or whatever), back in a while!" and that was it. I was old enough to be outdoors on my own, that meant I was old enough to be responsible for decisions that affected my own safety. I was the one responsible if I got into a fix, and I was the one who had to get out of it. Nobody would have known where to look, and I LIKED that. Still do. It also made me THINK, knowing I had to fend for myself.

I laugh when I read all this talk of cell phones as safety devices, GPS built into them, and so on. Nowhere that I like to go in the outdoors does my cell phone work. Nowhere. I turn it on when I go down into the valley to go shopping in the big city. I do have a radio that, if I can make it to the truck, would get me help. I carry it for a lot more reasons than saving my own butt when I get stuck in a mudhole, though, and have never used it.

We live in an age when the acceptable risk to humans engaged in any activity is ZERO. We have convinced ourselves, as a society, that protection from ourselves or random occurrence is a basic human right, that mother nature does not have the right to harm us in any way, nor can we become food for something that might wish to have dinner today. We use technology as a substitute for situational awareness and basic fieldcraft, skills our grandfathers used every day of their lives. We use a GPS instead of knowing that the sun rises in the east, that water runs downhill, and that a map represents the land we are walking on.

I know I am not at the top of the food chain, and that the things I enjoy carry with them a certain probability that I will DIE while I am doing them. And I accept that risk. I want the coyotes to have me when it is my time, and the heck with anyone knowing where they are gnawing on my bones.