On the EDGE

Pocket PCs and other PDAs were designed with portability in mind. They're great for salesmen and other on-the-go professionals. And as I mentioned in my last article, they're also great for hiking, biking, bird watching, and other outdoor activities. But how useful and reliable are Pocket PCs for those of us who enjoy more extreme sports? We decided to test this out in rock and ice climbing, as well as hang gliding.

Keeping track of equipment with ListPro

Contrary to what you see in the movies, most rock climbing involves only your hands and feet. Ropes are there as safety lines. In fact, you need a whole lot of gear while climbing to protect you and your climbing partners from the inevitable fall. This gear is called "pro," for "protection" (see Screen 1). Pro is carried by the lead climber and placed in the rock as he or she moves upward. It is removed from the rock by the climber bringing up the rear.

Screen 1: Some of the gear carried by rock climbers.

Climbing requires copious amounts of gear, including carabiners, ascenders, pitons, camming units, nuts, hammer, webbing, rope, webbing stepladders, haul bags, pulleys. You may not use every single thing on a particular climb, but whatever you forget will be the one piece of pro that you need! A checklist is definitely in order and we used ListPro from Ilium Software (www.iliumsoft.com/listpro.htm) to put one together (see Screen 2). ListPro is available for Pocket, Palm-size, Handheld, and desktop PCs. We got the Pocket PC and desktop PC versions, created the lists on our desktop PCs, and downloaded them to our Pocket PC. We added our most critical pro and climbing gear to ListPro and used it to assemble gear for our climbs.

Screen 2: We used Ilium Software's ListPro to put together a checklist of the various equipment we would need on our climbs.

Creating a digital guidebook for each climb

When you're a kid, you see a rock and you climb it. But try that with a serious route and you may get yourself hurt. You need to know what type of rock you are climbing so that you know what type of pro to bring. For example, pro designed for granite will pull out of soft sandstone. Also, you need to make sure that the route's difficulty rating is within your ability. Climbers follow the Yosemite Decimal System (YDS) to rate the climb difficulty. The YDS starts at 5.0 (which your grandma can climb in her Sunday shoes) and currently ends at 5.14 (even Spiderman on steroids can't tackle that). These ratings are route specific. For example, a rock face may have several routes to the top ­ each with a different YDS rating. The above items need to be studied and combined carefully. We always take the planning portion of our climbs seriously, and take notes with us on the various routes we may encounter. We decided to use the Pocket PC to put together a digital guidebook for our planned routes, complete with photographs and descriptions.