Two city guys bagged a deer, and they began to drag it by the feet.  After the antlers tangled in the brush for half an hour, one said, “Maybe we should try dragging him by the other side,” and the second agreed.  After four hours, the second one said, “This is definitely a lot easier.”  The first one said, “It is…but we’re going farther and farther from the truck.”

In a previous article, we discussed how to if you’re hiking across unimproved terrain, you need a pace count for yourself. We are going to take that information a step further and learn how to navigate without a compass.

Using the Sun to Navigate

Finding the right direction is just as important as traveling the right distance.  More, in many regards.  So how do we find our direction?  We start with the primitive, and work our way up to the advanced.  During the day, the sun’s course…traveling from east to west in the sky is your first field expedient tool.  This method is termed the Shadow Tip Method and can help you find true North. The following video will explain the Shadow Tip Method.

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How to Find True North

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Now draw a line perpendicular, or 90 degrees through the middle of your east-west line.  That new line will be your north-south line.  North is the top, and south is the bottom.  Cool beans?  Let’s keep going.  In times of limited sunlight, you can find moss-covered bases of trees…the moss almost always thrives on the north side for some arcane reason.  In addition, use your larger rivers…they almost always flow from north to south.  These are field-expedient methods, but they work.

Navigate by the Stars

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The stars are another one of nature’s navigation tools we can use. On a clear night where the stars are visible, you can use the Big Dipper.  The front edge of the “cup” …those two stars…the base star distance to the top edge star…stay in alignment with these two.  Use your fingertips to approximate these points, and then five increments (five times) that distance in the same direction as those two stars, and you’ll run right into the North Star.  It is not that bright, but it is solitary and singular.  And you can confirm it.On the opposite side of the sky, you will find the “Lazy-W,” also known as Cassiopeia.  This constellation…take the middle star in the “W” and using the left edge of the letter’s first two stars…do the same thing that you did for the Big Dipper with your fingertips.  Approximate five of these increments from that middle star in the “W” out from the center, and you will once again “hit” the North Star…also known as the “Pole” Star.  Of all the stars, the Pole Star remains constant.

Finding north is important, because if you know where you are in relation to where you want to be, the North Star can give you your direction…a straight line axis from your position.  South is opposite, and then you can draw an East-West axis line across it…to estimate your direction of travel.

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