Always know where you are and always look good. And if you don’t know where you are, always look good.
– from the US special forces
Here is the next installment of this blog’s pdf survival guide, navigation:
I’ve chosen all the easy techniques that give you a broad idea of north and south, assuming that you don’t have GPS or a compass – looking at the sun or moon to find the directions, for instance.
I didn’t include a couple more complicated techniques. One is making a compass by magnetizing a needle. Another method is to use the shadow cast by a stick to track the path of the sun (or moon). The shadow method takes a while but gives you very accurate directions. I wanted to keep the techniques in my pdf really short and basic, even if they’re not 100% accurate, so I didn’t include these more complicated techniques.
As I was doing the stars, I downloaded the Night Sky app to try to familiarize myself with the constellations a little bit. I liked it very much. If you’re looking to get in touch with your primitive ancestry and commune directly with nature, this is one of the best apps out there.