You may be misinterpreting the jist of what I was saying
@Chris. A GPS is a wonderful tool to have along and use. The problem comes in when you start to rely on it beyond "where am I, right now." I have had a high quality GPS lie to me even then. You know those white oaks we have in Oregon? Ya, they'll kill a GPS signal. Degrade it to the point that a GPS will outright lie to you as to where you are. Same with getting into steep terrain. All sorts of interesting things happen when the GPS only sees two or three satellites.
The maps that you see on Google Earth, with the satellite photography, are a wonderful thing. But how recent are they? How tall are the trees that you see? What's underneath them? Most publicly available mapping in the US is based on USGS 1:100K Digital Line Graph maps. Most of those maps are based on / abstracted from hand drawn 1:24K maps and hand written field notes from the 1920's and 1930's. This is especially true of anything west of Utah.
What I am advocating is developing your existing navigational sense. Bring what you are doing anyway, naturally, into your conscious mind. It's pretty easy to develop that innate ability to the point where you can close your eyes and point to the nearest river, mountain or other landmark within a reasonable bit. It's like in the coast range. Rivers generally flow east or west. Creeks flow north or south. Most major canyons run generally east or west unless they are the smaller ones which run north and south. Water always flows down hill. Most mainline roads run up by the ridge lines. The major highways run in the river valleys, mostly. If you head up hill until you hit a mainline you can follow it until you hit a main spur heading down hill. That spur is going to connect to a highway. If you turn in the direction of the flow of water you're going to end up at the coast. If you turn in the other direction you are going to end up in Portland or Salem. At night, you can see the glow from the lights in Portland from bloody everywhere, if you look.
Even with a large sized, sophisticated laptop and advanced cartographic software, what you can see is pretty limited. Then the issue becomes the more area you look at, the less detail you can see. The more detail you can see, the smaller the area that you can look at is. When you carry that around in your head, build that map in your brain, you can see both with some practice. That's the key. You can see the details you're interested in, in relation to the general area you're traveling through. All the stuff that you're not interested in is suppressed by your brain and only the stuff you're interested in is in focus.
Does that make sense? It's pretty pointless to agonize over the perfect GPS, because it doesn't exist yet. You would have to be able to jack one into your brain to make it work the way it needs to.
