The Essential Wilderness Navigator: How to Find Your Way in the Great Outdoors, Second Edition Author: David Seidman | Language: English | ISBN:
0071361103 | Format: PDF
The Essential Wilderness Navigator: How to Find Your Way in the Great Outdoors, Second Edition Description
From the Back Cover
The Essential Series--Your Trusted Guides
"Puts the world of wilderness navigation in the palm of your hand."--Adventure West
"Teaches the essential disciplines of compass and map-reading . . . but goes beyond the basics with useful, eye-opening advice on how to read nature's highway signs--vegetation bands, wind-whipped ripples in sand or snow, and the positions of the sun and stars."--Northeast Outdoors
If you're at all unsure of your backwoods direction-finding skills, The Essential Wilderness Navigator is the guide you've been looking for. It teaches you how to observe--to see, smell, hear, and sense the details of the environment around you. Then, to supplement your newly enhanced sense of direction, you'll learn to read maps, use a compass, and find your location and route with reference to landmarks. This updated second edition also includes
- The basics of global positioning system (GPS) navigation and CD-ROM maps
- A full-color section on reading topographical maps
- Navigating in deserts, mountains, and snow
Whether you're planning an extended wilderness trek or a day hike on marked trails, here's how to stay found.
About the Author
David Seidman has spent a good portion of his life finding his way around the world. He's crossed oceans, toured central Asia and Mongolia without a map or the ability to speak the language, and found a Mayan ruin in Guatemala. He is the author of The Essential Sea Kayaker and The Complete Sailor and is an editor at Boating magazine.
Paul Cleveland has worked as a wilderness ranger in New Mexico and designed and built trails in the Appalachians. He is a frequent contributor to Backpacker and Climbing magazines and the Gorp.com Web pages. He guides whitewater rafting trips and teaches CPR and first aid for the Red Cross and wilderness navigation for Outward Bound.
- Series: The Essential Series
- Paperback: 173 pages
- Publisher: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press; 2 edition (December 28, 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0071361103
- ISBN-13: 978-0071361101
- Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 0.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
You want to learn how to use a map and compass? For hiking or backpacking, especially remote wilderness? This is the best comprehensive book I've found on the subject, bar none. Reasons:
1. It gets to the point quickly in teaching you map & compass fundamentals. No fluff, no wasted time on esoteric principles of magnetism or the rules of orienteering competitions (a fine sport, but one bearing little resemblance to actual wilderness navigation with its special large-scale magnetic-north maps and simplified compasses etc.) Instead, this book concentrates on one objective: accurate land navigation in a wilderness environment.
2. It teaches realistic methods, and does not emphasize the unrealistic ones (one glaring example: penciling a lot of inaccurate magnetic declination lines all over your map the night before your trip (because the author used the method once for an adventure race with a special large-scale map and thinks it's cool) instead of just buying a compass with adjustable declination or pasting a pointer indicating a true bearing on your compass baseplate! Hey, sitting atop a windblown mountain is no place to attempt to draw magnetic lines of declination with a three-inch compass baseplate when you walk off your pre-marked map or have to use a friend's copy!
3. It has large, clear, easy-to-follow illustrations. Believe me, this is a rarity in most map/compass books.
4. It teaches BOTH compass dead reckoning (compass only) AND terrain association (map priority) navigation principles and shows the advantages and weaknesses of each in a given situation. Some orienteering-biased books would have you believe the compass is only good for aligning a map to magnetic north!
5.
This book is good, and would have warranted four stars, when published back in 2001 (Second Edition). The general navigation and wayfinding techniques are clearly discussed and illustrated, but there have been some key developments in the mapping world that the authors should address in an updated edition.
First, the authors are unfairly dismissive of grid systems like UTM. Now, back in 2001 this was acceptable since the USGS really didn't have an accepted grid system. They put both UTM and Lat/Long grid tics on the topo quad sheets and basically said "use what you like". This attitude has caused endless confusion among topo map users in the US. However, post 9/11 and Katrina the USGS has agreed to adopt the US National Grid system, which is nothing more than the Military Grid Reference System extended across the US. The USGS has also begun producing the excellent US Topo series of maps as a substitute for the old 7.5 minute quad sheets, and these new maps all have the US National Grid overprinted on them. These two developments alone should be enough to force the authors and publishers of all land navigation handbooks and guides to update their works.
Next is the GPS appendix. Like it or not, GPS receivers are now a standard part of most hiker's kit and consumer GPS technology has come a LONG way since 2001. I don't really think it is useful to discuss specific GPS navigation techniques in a book focusing on map and compass navigation, that is really a better topic for a separate publication. I DO think it is important to address both the benefits of having a GPS unit available and to have a frank discussion of GPS system limitations based on things like receiver design, satellite visibility and geometry, masking, the effects of canopy cover, etc.
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