There are also free road and topo maps (of varying quality) available at. Garmin sells a 100K scale US topo and regional 24K topos as well as road maps. The most popular hiking GPS seems to be the Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx, recently discontinued (but you may still be able to buy new or used units). While this helps, plotting the track on a map is still much more useful. (Mapping GPSes will plot the track on the map.) One way to improve the useability of a non-mapping unit is to put waypoints at nearby summits, trail junctions, trailheads, and points of interest to make the track plots more meaningful. Non-mapping GPSes can plot your track, but it is on a blank background and of limited use. Many mapping hiking GPSes can also be used while driving while a non-mapping GPS would be pretty useless. Without the mapping, you have to use lat and lon to transfer your location to/from a map-a slow and error-prone process which may be difficult to do in bad conditions. With the mapping, you can see where you are at a glance and generally transfer your location to a paper map by inspection.
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