The headline at least – “Blazing a Trail With a Smartphone, Visual Signposts Included” – promised a wondrous experience. The New York Times column on Wednesday, March 11 focused on some software that can turn your GPS-enabled cellphone into a dynamo that allows you to navigate a route and post photos, audio clips, and descriptive and helpful points of interest. My mind started leaping: Perhaps it was a way to share the sights and sounds of walking experiences with the Mindful Walker audience.

Mind you, I’m only just planning to soon post photos and images with the Mindfulwalker.com content, so I reminded myself to walk before I fly. And, a confession: I don’t use any Global Positioning System device yet. I love maps, all kinds, from the well-worn, folded ones in my car to Google Maps to raised-relief topographic maps. One of the most interesting “mappings” is how we travel from site to site online, seeking out maps, photos, and videos of places near and far. I’m enchanted that, through photos and an online diary, I can enjoy and study the hikes of a fellow in the Lake District, England, where my partner and I plan to travel later this year.

Also, some family and friends swear by their GPS receivers. But perhaps I was burned by my first GPS experience when a cabbie using one drove me to a dead-end construction site on East 70^th Street and insisted it was the right location of the office I had requested. He pointed to it like I was supposed to find the doctor’s office amid the construction crew and trailers: That’s what the GPS shows!

Loaded on a GPS-capable cellphone or GPS receiver and through accounts with wireless carriers or vendors, the Trimble Outdoors mobile application lets hikers, bikers, and walkers get access to many user-generated route maps and other navigational help, track their activities for fitness, create maps, share their trips, keep personal libraries, and explore online caches of points of interest, photos, and audio clips that others upload. That includes thousands of maps the editorial staff of Backpacker Magazine has uploaded, according to the Times. Wow!

Yet judging by the hiking experience columnist Bob Tedeschi described in the Times, I’d need a very large backpack of patience to use the GPS-enabled smartphone program. Moreover, it makes me question what the use of these devices and software does to the experience of walking.

Foul Weather Fear

Reading Tedeschi’s chronicle of the smartphone with this app was almost painful. He told in much detail how he found a treasure trove of one hiker’s maps of a location he wanted to hike that turned out to be fairly useless, how confusing he found the phone’s prompts to be, how at times overlapping text on the screen made it hard to tell where he was, and other glitches. “I yearned for a signal of some kind – a vibration, say – as I got closer to an important point, so I wouldn’t have to keep glancing at the phone,” Tedeschi wrote. I wasn’t sure if the key issues were with the software, how he used it, or with what he expected.

Tedeschi wondered what would happen if “in all of your power-sapping, GPS glory,” you find that the phone’s battery died. Solutions exist, he noted, but they involve purchasing a Powerstick (for $60) or better yet, a charger with three miniature solar panels and oomph (for $170). So now, I’m thinking, I’ve got to buy not only power hiking boots but a bag load of electronics or other hardware to walk in the woods or along the seashore. And, Tedeschi mused about the battery issue, if you’re in the rain, “You’re going to have major problems.”

Am I missing something here? I have no doubt that intrepid, experienced hikers and others make use of these GPS-enabled devices and their ambitious software to the hilt, or that practical, even life-saving, uses exist. And I may be body-snatched by one of these gizmos at some point, if I know I can create an experience to be shared with others. But what’s the cost to my experience? How does it shape what I see, hear, smell, touch, and feel when outdoors? I wonder what kind of companion I become when toting one of these.

It makes me think of my cellphone. I’ll boast a little to myself after I’ve cleaned up or replied to 12 e-mails, checked Facebook, and caught the day’s headlines just between Mahwah, N.J. and New Paltz, N.Y., while riding the Trailways bus. Yet, bent over slightly and pecking away, I totally missed the sight of the mountains or the first stars of twilight.

And that’s the experience I’m trying to reconcile with a hike, long walk, or bike ride outdoors. We have one industry devoted to creating products, ways, and programs to quiet down and be mindful, and one that produces ways to gear up. We’re always seeking the balance. My favorite device on a walk, a la Harriet the Spy, is a good, old notebook. That’s paper, not a laptop. Still, I get hooked as much as the next person on the idea of sharing walks or rides with so many others via the technology and online.

It’s got to be kept in check, however. I don’t want to be hiking right by a bald eagle or not looking at elegant branches silhouetted before a blue sky because I’m peering at and tapping on my smartphone.