The Natural Navigator

Last month I attended a course on natural navigation – learning to find your orientation without map, compass GPS or any other instructions, relying instead on cues from nature.

Tristan Gooley wrote a book called The Natural Navigator – which I’d highly recommend – and he also runs courses.

Here, in brief, are some simplified things I learned (and I hope Tristan’s not reading because I’ve probably bastardised them horribly. Buy his book if you want to find out properly!)…

1. On an east-west running path in the northern hemisphere, you’ll find more puddles and dips on the southern side as it invariably gets less sunlight.
2. You can sometimes get a gauge of north and south by putting a hand on different sides of a rock to see which has been warmed more by the sun.
3. In winter, the sun goes from south east to south west. In the summer it goes from north east to north west in a much bigger arc. Pretty basic but my sunrise/sunset navigation would have been a long way off before I knew that.
4. If you look at a tree and imagine cutting it down the middle and weighing each half, the heavier half will be on the side with more sun.
5. If you rely on little tips and tricks like this then A) You miss the beauty of the art and B) You’ll probably oversimplify and make mistakes

Buy the Natural Navigator on Amazon