Learn essential outdoor navigation skills for Scouts, hikers and adventurers, including maps, compasses, bearings, GPS, grid references, orienteering and route planning.
You don’t always have a compass in your hand when you’re outdoors. Your equipment might have been left behind, you may be teaching someone the basics of navigation, or you might simply want to improve your ability to understand the landscape around you. There are several ways to work out roughly which direction you are…
A map is one of those pieces of outdoor equipment that is easy to take for granted until it gets soaked and starts to fall apart in your hands. Once the paper becomes wet, it can become difficult to fold, markings can smudge and the map may start to tear surprisingly easily. Keeping it protected…
Navigation becomes much more difficult when the landscape stops giving you obvious clues. A clear path, visible hilltop or distinctive landmark can make navigation relatively straightforward. Dense woodland, steep slopes, poor visibility and featureless terrain remove many of those clues. This is where strong navigation skills become particularly important. In difficult terrain, you need to…
GPS and digital mapping can be extremely useful outdoors, but they should not be the only navigation skills you have. A phone can lose battery, lose signal, become damaged or simply stop working when you need it most. Electronic navigation can also make it tempting to follow a moving dot without understanding the landscape around…
Good navigation is not simply about reaching your destination. It is about knowing where you are throughout the journey. A navigation checkpoint is a planned point on a route where you stop or pause to confirm your position, check your progress and prepare for the next section. Checkpoints are particularly useful on longer or more…
Being able to take a bearing is one skill. Being able to navigate an entire route is another. A successful route requires more than knowing which direction to walk. You need to understand the terrain, identify useful navigation features, decide where to check your position and have a plan for what to do if something…
A map tells you where you are and where you want to go. A compass helps you keep moving in the right direction. Using the two together is one of the most useful navigation skills you can develop. A compass on its own cannot tell you exactly where you are. A map on its own…
Knowing what a bearing is and knowing how to take one are important navigation skills. The next step is being able to use bearings successfully while travelling. Following a bearing across open ground sounds simple: set the compass, point in the right direction and walk. In practice, things such as uneven ground, obstacles, poor visibility,…
A grid reference is a simple way of describing a precise location on a map. Once you understand the basic system, you can use grid references to find features, mark locations, give directions and communicate where you are if you need help. For walkers, Scouts and anyone learning map reading, the most important rule to…
Contour lines can look confusing when you first open a walking map. There may be dozens of thin lines running across the page, sometimes packed closely together and sometimes spread far apart. But contour lines are actually giving you one of the most useful pieces of information on the entire map: They show you the…
