Reading contour lines, Taking and walking on a compass bearing, with declination explained, Phone GPS on the trail, Pacing and timing as navigation tools, Route finding above the treeline and off-trail, Navigating at night and in whiteout.
Darkness and whiteout are different problems that produce the same effect: the world shrinks to a few metres, and every technique that relied on seeing a feature and walking to it stops working. What remains is the compass, the count, the watch and a set of decisions made in advance. This article covers how to … Read more
Above the treeline the path often fades into a braid of sheep tracks, then into nothing. Off-trail in forest or tundra there was never a path to begin with. In both cases navigation stops being a matter of following and becomes a matter of choosing: which line across the ground is easiest to hold, easiest … Read more
A contour line is a simple promise: every point along it sits at the same height above sea level. Everything else in map reading grows out of that one idea. Once we can see a hillside in a bundle of brown lines, the map stops being a drawing and becomes a model of the ground … Read more
A compass does one thing: it points at magnetic north. Everything useful we get from it, a direction to walk, a way to identify a peak, a line to hold in fog, comes from combining that single fact with a map and a little discipline. This article walks through the full procedure for a baseplate … Read more
The phone in our pocket is a better navigation instrument than anything a hiker could buy twenty years ago. It also fails in ways a paper map never does, and it fails most reliably at the exact moment we depend on it. This article is not an argument against phone navigation; we use it on … Read more
Most navigation errors are not errors of direction but of distance. We hold a good bearing, walk confidently, and then turn off at the wrong stream because we did not know how far we had come. Two old techniques answer the question “how far?” without any electronics: counting paces for short legs and timing for … Read more
