SGUK Outdoor Skills Challenge 59: Teach a Friend One Navigation Technique

Knowing a navigation technique is useful, but being able to explain it clearly to someone else is a different skill. Teaching makes you slow down, explain each step and check whether the other person genuinely understands what to do.

Your challenge is to teach a friend one simple navigation technique that can be practised outdoors using the landscape around you.

Your Challenge

Choose one navigation technique and teach it to a friend in a familiar, safe outdoor area. Use natural features and landmarks to make the lesson practical.

For this challenge, you could teach your friend how to use a distinctive landmark to maintain direction, follow a clear natural feature such as a stream from a safe path alongside it, or recognise a series of landmarks along a short route.

What You’ll Need

• A friend who is willing to learn
• A familiar outdoor area with clear landmarks
• A short, safe route that you both know
• Naturally occurring features you can use for demonstration

You do not need to collect or damage anything. Choose an area where you can remain on permitted paths and avoid steep ground, fast-flowing water, cliffs and other hazards.

Take the Challenge

1. Choose your technique. Pick one skill you understand well enough to explain. For example, you might teach your friend how to use a prominent tree, hill or building as a reference point while moving along a safe path.
2. Explain what it does. Tell your friend when the technique is useful and what it cannot tell them. A landmark can help confirm where you are or where you are heading, but a single feature does not guarantee that you are following the correct route.
3. Demonstrate it. Show your friend how you use the technique. Point out the features you notice and explain how they help you make decisions.
4. Let your friend try. Ask them to choose a landmark or explain the next navigation decision. Give them time to work it out rather than immediately supplying the answer.
5. Check their understanding. Ask your friend to explain the technique back to you in their own words. If anything is unclear, demonstrate that part again.
6. Practise on a short route. Let your friend use the technique at several points along a familiar path. Keep the route simple and remain together throughout the exercise.

Do not deliberately get lost or use the exercise to test your friend in an unfamiliar or hazardous area. Natural landmarks can be obscured by weather, vegetation or darkness, so explain when another navigation method is needed.

Check Your Results

Check your teaching against these points:

• Could you explain the technique clearly?
• Did you demonstrate it rather than simply describe it?
• Could your friend use it without you giving every instruction?
• Could they explain the main steps back to you?
• Did you explain the technique’s limitations?

Complete the Challenge

Your challenge is complete when you have taught one navigation technique, watched your friend practise it and checked that they can explain the main steps themselves.

Take a photograph together at a suitable landmark or photograph the feature you used for the lesson. Ask permission before including your friend’s face in anything you share.

How to Submit Your Challenge

Submit your evidence

1. Go to your SGUK member profile.
2. Open Social Activity.
3. Upload a photograph of your evidence to the activity wall.
4. Add the hashtag #SGUKChallenge59.
5. Share it for verification.

Challenge 59 Checklist

Want to Push Yourself?

Ask your friend to teach the same technique to another person. See whether they can pass on the skill accurately without your help, then discuss which explanations made it easiest to understand.

What’s Next?

If you haven’t completed the previous challenge, try SGUK Outdoor Skills Challenge 58: Make a Clay and Grass Plaster to Seal a Shelter Wall. You can complete the SGUK Challenges in any order.

Once you’ve shared your evidence and it has been verified, the SGUK Outdoor Skills Challenge 59 is complete and the completed challenges figure will be updated on your profile.

Learn. Practise. Master.

That’s what the SGUK Outdoor Skills Challenge is all about.