Learn essential outdoor navigation skills for Scouts, hikers and adventurers, including maps, compasses, bearings, GPS, grid references, orienteering and route planning.
Imagine you’re walking across open countryside when someone in your group gets injured. You can see fields and footpaths all around you, but you don’t know the name of the nearest road or how to describe your exact position to the emergency services. This is where what3words can be useful. The system gives locations three-word…
There’s a useful difference between walking a route someone else has marked and being able to mark a route for somebody to follow. The second takes a little more thought. You need to decide where a marker belongs, make its meaning clear and check that the next person can follow it without having to guess….
Navigation doesn’t have to mean walking for miles with a map and compass. For children, learning to navigate can start with something much simpler: understanding where they are, knowing where they want to go and working out how to get there. A short route is a great way to practise. It might be a walk…
Planning a walk is part of the adventure. You don’t need to plan every minute or create a complicated route, but taking a little time to think about where you’re going, how long you might be out and what you need can make a walk much more enjoyable. Learning to plan a short walk also…
Being able to follow simple directions is an important outdoor skill. Whether you’re walking with your family, taking part in an activity or exploring with a group, you need to be able to listen, understand what you’ve been told and use the information around you to work out where to go next. It doesn’t mean…
Understanding directions is one of those outdoor skills that seems simple at first, but becomes incredibly useful once you start exploring. Knowing the difference between north, south, east and west gives you a basic way of describing where things are and helps you make sense of maps, paths and the landscape around you. You don’t…
When you’re navigating outdoors, you don’t always need to follow an exact bearing from one point to another. Sometimes it is easier and safer to use features that are already in the landscape to guide you. Two particularly useful navigation techniques are handrails and catching features. They are simple ideas, but they can make navigation…
Being able to orientate a map is one of those navigation skills that makes everything else much easier. Instead of trying to mentally turn the landscape around to match the map, you turn the map so that it represents the ground in front of you. Once a map is orientated, features on the paper should…
If you find yourself outdoors without a compass, there are still ways to work out roughly which direction is north. The Sun, shadows and stars can all give you useful clues, although none of these methods should be treated as a precise replacement for a compass. The most important thing is to understand what each…
Learning how to take a back bearing is a simple navigation skill that can give you a useful check on where you have come from. It is particularly helpful when you’re navigating across open ground, checking a route or trying to confirm that a feature you’ve identified is actually where you think it is. Once…
