Learn essential outdoor navigation skills for Scouts, hikers and adventurers, including maps, compasses, bearings, GPS, grid references, orienteering and route planning.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
Knowing how long a walk will take is an important part of route planning. It affects what time you start, how much food and water you carry, whether you will finish before dark and whether the route is suitable for everyone in your group. The…
Rain Doesn’t Have to Stop Skill Practice Some outdoor skills are actually easier to practise when you are not rushing around outdoors. A rainy day gives you an opportunity to work on navigation, knots, equipment organisation, planning and observation without needing a full expedition. If…
You have planned your route, checked the weather, packed your bag and set off for a good day’s walking. Then you reach a footpath and discover that you cannot continue. It might be a fallen tree, flooding, a damaged bridge, a locked gate, a landslip,…
Navigation is one of the most useful outdoor skills Scouts can learn. Being able to read a map, understand direction and work out where you are can turn an ordinary walk into an exciting adventure. The best way to teach navigation is to get Scouts…
