Another Way to Find Yourself

Fourth article in a seven-part series

Mariners the world over must navigate with the latitude/longitude standard of degrees/minutes/seconds to determine their position. But dry-landers have another option that's easier to use in the field and potentially more accurate when measuring map locations. This system is called Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) and it greatly simplifies map-to-GPS and GPS-to-map operations.

Here's the waypoint for the end of one of my favorite MTB trails to Barse Lake as seen in latitude/longitude format on my GPS screen:

Now I'll open the navigation setup menu and switch the position format from lat/long 000000.000' (degrees/minutes/decimal-minutes) to UTM:

Back to the waypoint again and here's how it looks in the new format:

Here's how to decipher UTM waypoints. The first thing to know is that 17T refers to the UTM zone covering this region. Most topographic maps today note the UTM zones they cover.