"Bushwhacking through a stand of stunted aspens above 10,000 feet in Utah's Tushar mountain range, the mountain guide Trevor Katz held his Garmin to the sky and pointed it south. "We should just look for an opening," he said, glancing over at his colleague, Bailey Pugh, from under a ball cap he'd cut into a visor. He took a few steps steeply uphill, then down, careful not to slide on the scree. "It says it's right below us, by probably 10 meters. Wait, five.""
"Wading through walls of branches, he and Pugh circled, eyes trained on the ground. Then, there it was. Stuck in the dirt, the hexagonal silver node looked like a device an alien could have planted. Its small antenna and carrying strap sat above the earth. A sharp spike below anchored it into the slope. It would be a strange thing to stumble upon this so high in the mountains, surrounded only by what can survive at such an elevation."
"This is just one of 200 nodes planted across the range in a tidy grid, each tracked with a GPS waypoint. Earlier, they had placed the nodes in the ground; now it was time to extract them. Pugh hoisted this one out of the ground and into her pack. Then it was back to bushwhacking. "This is why they had to hire mountain guides," Pugh told me, as we picked our steps carefully across boulders."
Trevor Katz and Bailey Pugh navigated aspens above 10,000 feet in Utah's Tushar Range using a Garmin to locate small hexagonal nodes planted in the soil. The nodes featured antennas, carrying straps and spikes anchoring them into slopes. The devices were part of a grid of 200 GPS-tracked nodes across the range. Crews had earlier placed the nodes and returned to extract them, hoisting each roughly 20-pound unit into packs. Teams were hired through a guiding company, met at the Deer Trail Mine, and received GPS waypoints and instructions to plant or recover nodes. The work paid $500 a day plus per diem.
Read at The Atlantic
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