It turns out that my phone dropped out of the front pocket of my Aarn pack, I discovered a few minutes later.

There's no way I was going to be able to find it in this terrain, and I had no phone, because my spouse wasn't up for the 4 hour round trip to the summit after 5.5 hours to the hut. The track is relatively well marked but it is also easy to go off track, and the pockets were hanging a bit low, so away my phone went. Oops.

Spectacular terrain, though.

But I had noticed that I was on network, so I should be able to find the phone, I thought. The next day, I went for a walk, leaving at 5:25am. I was hoping to quickly find the phone and then walk back out to the Robert Ridge carpark.

Nope!

Visibility was much worse, though GPS-aided navigation was possible.

In case you were wondering: if you remember your Google password (which I do), you can use what is now called the Find Hub to find your phone. It'll let you enter e.g. your lock screen code as a secondary auth.

Unfortunately, the map that Find Hub displays is completely useless in the wilderness (it's the Google Maps map).

Fortunately, if you are temporarily off network, you get an error message which has a URL string with the GPS coordinates that you're finding. So I wrote down the coordinates. Having paper and pen was a critical win here. Otherwise I would have had to memorize the digits to type them into some other app.

It would be terrible to have the wrong coordinates, wouldn't it?

I entered the coordinates on the previous toot into Gaia GPS as a location.

Let's zoom in on this track. You can see where I was looking for my phone, right? No phone found.

Strangely enough, the terrain to the indicated location was unfamiliar, and I had to cross snow to get there.

This location is 200m from the summit, which seems close, but really not close in this terrain. And Gaia was telling me I was like 1m from the alleged phone location.

I eventually gave up (after way too long navigating to this spot and way too long looking---like 2-3 hours!) and looked closely at the coordinates again.

Maybe I'll go climbing now and continue this tomorrow.

Can you see the discrepancy?

Oh, yeah, I had to cross snow to get to these coordinates. I did not remember any snow the previous day! Must have been an east facing slope.

But let me be super clear about this.

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: if you enter decimal degrees coordinates into Gaia GPS and you enter "too many" decimal digits for its liking, it will mark a spot that is *not* the spot that you intended. #GaiaGPS

OK, where were we? Right. Not where the phone was, apparently.

I plugged the coordinates into the Mapy app and *it* told me a different story, which was far more reasonable: not 200m from the summit but rather only about 20m off from the (sort of indistinct) track. That makes a lot more sense.

Now I needed to get back to Angelus Hut. I didn't really feel like backtracking back up to the summit. It was still just 9am, fortunately, and sunset is at 8:30pm.

At this point, visibility was good, but occasionally it would rain on me. There were 20mm of rain forecast but I don't think it ever got to that much.

Surely I could descend some other way and maybe even wrap back over to the original track. (That was not at all the case, as it turns out, and if I had looked at the topo more closely, I would have figured it out).

If you remember the track a few posts up, there is a false start: there was a gully that looked OK, and one doable downclimbing descent (just a 1m drop or so) but it turned out to be more cliffy than I wanted further on. Back up and into the river gully closest to the phone.

I had gone across the gully earlier, and also looked a bit into the gully where the marked location was. Since I'd gone that way already, I figured I would be able to do it again, and it got me back into the gully without further climbing there.

That gully was actually passable, with just a couple of downclimbing moves. I kept on looking for a way back to the track, but the gully sent me way to the northeast and the track to the west wasn't getting any closer, with cliffs in the way.

At least a bunch of the descent was scree skiing, which went quickly. The speed profile shows almost zero speed between 3h and 5h (which was the 200m cross-country and time looking for the phone) and then backcountry walking speed (1-2km/h) after that.

I saw that I would eventually intercept the Cascade Track which would bring me back to Angelus Hut. I did have 20m of forest to cross but having the GPS made it easy to know where the track really was. I expected be able to make good time on the Cascade Track.

https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/nelson-tasman/places/nelson-lakes-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/angelus-hut-via-travers-and-cascade-trackroute/

The Cascade Track is highly scenic. There are indeed cascades.

Oh, what do you need to have cascades? Elevation gain!

I was kind of in denial about just how much elevation I was losing. The summit was at 2075m, the low point was at 1188m, and the hut was at 1650m. Oof. After the 500m to the summit, here was another 500m to climb to get back up to the hut.

There was also a bridge (1 person max) but it was totally unnecessary and after I followed the path leading out of the bridge I eventually got to a point 50m lower which looked awfully familiar. Turns out I'd done a loop. Bonus elevation gain!

But, it was just tramping on a track. (uphill.)

Day 2, unsuccessful phone mission, recap: 7.6km, +/- 980m elevation, 8 hours, moving time 5:25.

I got back to the hut at 1:30pm, which was 3.5 hours after my intended return time, so my spouse was a bit worried, but the volunteer hut warden wasn't. There were a couple of spicy moments, but nothing that I thought was too sketchy.

The weather wasn't great, but fortunately these rocks did not get slippery in the rain, and I could navigate well enough using GPS when necessary. Definitely it would have been hard without GPS and I would have had to give up sooner than I did.

I'm sure I could have retrieved the phone later in that day, but it would have been a bit awkward to go right out again after coming back so late, with less than perfect visibility.