Regular followers of ours know that as far as survival is concerned, one the best ways to be prepared is to never be in a place where you need survival skills. We spend a great deal of time at Nature Reliance School attempting to impress upon our students the mindset that Land Navigation skills are a must. Particularly those that involve map and compass.
Tracy Trimble teaches our land nav classes at NRS, and I have learned a ton from him on the subject. Over the holiday I asked if he had some time to set up a practical exercise for my son and I. He was happy to oblige us, and we coupled it with an overnight testing out some new sleeping gear each of us had gotten, and feasting on some venison.
Here is what Tracy did. He took us to a location that I was only somewhat familiar with, meaning I had visited it once before but never really hiked the area off trail. He then gave us the coordinates of a meet up location and said….bye. It was our responsibility to get to the meetup using our legs and map and compass skills.
This is great practice for me since I am not proficient at land nav skills. Because of this, we took the necessary precautions just in case something went awry. I am telling you this because this is a good way to get out and get in a lot of skills practice, but we do not want you getting lost in the process.
- Tracy did some pre-planning and knew about how long it would take us via a few routes.
- We set a final time that we would both be at the meetup place.
- We took proper kit with us in case their were injuries, or issues such as hypothermia.
- We were planning to stay the night, but even if we were not, we would have had supplies to stay in case of emergency. This included signalling devices, fire starting kits, and sleeping gear.
- We had radios that we assumed we could use on the ridge tops making our way to one another.
- We had GPS units as backups to help us navigate if we needed them. (YOU NEED TO WATCH THE VIDEO TO SEE HOW USEFUL MINE WAS, HINT: IT WASN’T)
Again if you are regular followers of ours then please note that this video is a bit longer than what we normally do. It follows Zane and I for a while and then it follows Tracy for a while. Our purpose was to give you two different perspectives.
If you are interested in doing this and you are close to our area, then let us know. We offer guiding services for these exercises so you can be put into this scenario as well, we go with you and make sure you are safe, but that you get challenged as well.
Come on, join in, let’s learn together!
