Garmin gets outdoors with Ellis Brigham Mountain Sports

Snowdonia was the venue for the now annual Ellis Brigham Mountain Sports staff training event and this year proved as successful as previous years with 16 members of staff from around the country converging on Wales to use various pieces of outdoor kit in the environment that they were made for.

Store staff got to try out Oregon 450/450t, Dakota 20 and even the brand new GPSMAP 62ST with Garmin GB Discoverer 1:25k OS maps for Snowdonia to navigate their way through what proved to be very poor visibility. The first day consisted a walk/scramble to Carnedd Llewelyn, pre-planned on the computer and then transferred wirelessly from unit to unit.

Once at the top visibility was very poor and the GPS units came into their own guiding us off the mountain and back down to the road. The second day saw a shorter planned route heading up to Y Garn at 947 metres, but was steeper and very much wetter than the previous day. Driving rain allowed a good test bed for The North Face waterproofs staff had been issued with as well as the weather proofing on the Oregon & Dakota series. Both waterproofs and GPS worked well and even though a couple of deviations to the route were made due to weather and gradient the devices coped well and carried us out of the mist and rain and into the valleys below.

All in all a good few days of testing for the devices which stood up to everything that we were able to throw at them.