Low-Tech Land Navigation How to Navigate Without GPS The ability to find your way across the terrain can make your outdoor adventures more enjoyable, by “opening up” the entire wilderness to you. Without the ability to navigate cross country, you’re mostly limited to following trails. And while trail hiking is certainly an enjoyable way to see the wilderness, if the sum total of your land navigation skills involves finding the next blaze, you’re at a big disadvantage in the wilds. What if you lose your trail? Or what if you venture down the wrong trail? Or what if there’s an emergency, and you or one of your companions needs to be evacuated from the wilderness right away? As a blaze-following trail hiker, you may know which trail you’re on, but you may not be aware of where the nearest road is or how far away it is. Be Situationally AwareIf you’re a true navigator, you are “situationally aware” when it comes to knowledge of the surrounding terrain. This means you’ve consulted your map enough to know what lies around you. You know, for example, that there’s a north-south road two kilometers to the west of you. If you have to make an emergency exit from the wilds, you know you can find that road by walking cross country in a westerly direction.What about GPS?These days people are increasingly relying on GPS receivers to find their way.On the one hand, that’s good because anything that helps you understand your surroundings and stay found is a good thing. On the other hand, that’s bad because too many people with no backup land navigation skills rely on a GPS receiver to lead them into and out of places they might not otherwise go were it not for this handy little space-age gadget that runs on AA batteries. When that gadget fails—as GPSes sometimes do—these people who are now at a complete loss when it comes to pathfinding could be in big trouble. A Two-Day CourseA few years back I developed a two-day wilderness-based course about Low-Tech Land Navigation to teach people to find their way through wilderness without a GPS, using only a map and compass.What’s more, the people I taught learned how to find their way even if they had no compass, using only the sun, the stars, and the moon to guide them. Further, they also learned to find their way without a map, using only a compass. And last of all, they learned they could make an emergency exit from the wilderness even with no map and no compass. I always felt good about teaching these classes because I knew my students were learning skills that might one day save their life or the life of someone with them. Plus, I often sensed they were enjoying the heck out of learning something so useful. Two women, in particular, stand out in my memory. Upon finding their way back to our vehicle through thick woods in the dark of night using only a compass and dead reckoning, they were elated at what they had accomplished. One woman whose husband was a Marine said she couldn’t wait to tell him what she had learned how to do.  Using Ranger Beads to Keep Track of Distance The BookHaving developed the low-tech land navigation course, a few years later I wrote a book based on the course. This book, called Low-Tech Land Navigation can be used as the course text, but it can also function as a stand-alone book on the subject.Its purpose is to show you practical ways to find your way over land without the use of GPS or other space-age technology. With this book, you’ll learn how to use baselines—roads, rivers, trails, large shorelines, and so on—to find your way across the wilderness to specific checkpoints where you can fix your position with virtual certainty. You’ll learn how to use an orienteering compass, and how to account for variation, or declination as it’s sometimes called. To help you do this, you’ll need to memorize these two sentences: 1) Tiny vermin make disastrous companions, and 2) Can dead men vote twice at elections? Celestial GuidepostsBesides using a compass to find directions, you’ll also learn how to use the sun, the stars, and the moon to point the way.The SunYou’ll learn, for example, how to find direction by the sun all day long. With that skill, the sun becomes your bright celestial guidepost, almost as good as a compass.The StarsFor starlight navigating, you’ll learn to identify Polaris, the North Star. Then, you’ll learn how to find north by these constellations: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Charioteer, Pegasus, and the Northern Cross. You’ll also learn to find east and west by Orion, probably the best-known constellation. Finally, you’ll learn to find south by Scorpius. It’s hard to be directionless when you have a sky full of stars showing you the way.The MoonLast of all you’ll learn a few tricks for finding direction by the moon, whether the moon is waxing, waning, or is full.Safety BearingYou’ll also learn the importance of having an emergency safety bearing to help you exit the wilds without a map or a compass should it become necessary to do so.Mapless NavigationFinally, I’ll show you how to explore unfamiliar wilderness areas and return to your starting point when you have no map, but only a compass. Making an Improvised Travel Diagram from Sabal Palm Stalks Mapless navigation is really pretty cool. Essentially, you use a skill known as Dead Reckoning, keeping up with the directions you've traveled and the distance you've traveled in each direction. By doing this, you can explore unfamiliar territory, and end up your explorations right back near your vehicle, or other starting point. This is all explained in my book on Low-Tech Land Navigation but I also made this video in which I use this technique in a wild and wooly south Florida swamp. For Non-Arctic Regions of the Northern HemisphereLow-Tech Land Navigation is written for the non-arctic regions of the northern hemisphere. A good bit of its information would be valuable for land navigation in the southern hemisphere, but the part dealing with low-tech celestial navigation is written with the northern hemisphere in mind. |
