08-Nov-2014 -- I am spending this weekend at the Chaminade Conference Center in Santa Cruz, which is located just a couple of km from a confluence point, so on Friday before the conference started I took my Garmin Montana GPS and my Samsung S5 phone and loaded an autogenerated orienteering map on both of them.

I made the map by downloading the LiDAR laser scans of the area, processed that into contours and ground cover information, then combined it with the OpenStreetMap data of the area.

The route I took in the beginning was obviously not shown in the OSM data, but the hotel had a marked hiking trail in the very steep hillside west of the main building, so I started down that way, then ran NE on unmapped dirt roads I located going towards the mapped buildings, then bushwacked across the valley until I found the track on the opposite side. From that point I could follow good paths up to the golf course, then jogged along the golf cart tracks and took the same path down to the point as I have used on several previous visits.

On those visits my GPS accuracy have been pretty bad due to the dense tall trees surrounding the spot, but this time I also had the brand new GPS chip in my cell phone:

This GPS actually located and tracked 21 sats, giving EPE values down to 5 meters while the Garmin never got below 10 meter.

On the return journey I avoided the green valley and took the longer route along the regular road system, only picking up the original trail near the hotel.