Customer Reviews

The Essential Wilderness Navigator: How to Find Your Way in the Great Outdoors, Second Edition

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You want to learn how to use a map and compass? Mostly for navigating on land, 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, rules of orienteering competitions (a fine sport, but one bearing little resemblance to actual wilderness navigation with its special large-scale magnetic-north maps etc.) Just realistic wilderness land navigation.

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 "MAG + EAST = TRUE, MAG - WEST = TRUE" 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 clear, large, easy-to-understand 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. It has nice large pages and lays flat while you refer to various sections and practice using your map & compass. Don't laugh. Remember, you will learn land navigation by practicing outdoors what you're reading. One session of trying to refer to the tiny pocket paperback pages and dingy photos of competing books will make you a believer in a large-paged instruction book with clear illustrations.

6. It covers more advanced map/compass skills (such as plotting your position using resection, etc.) as well as beginner exercises, and does so in the same clear, practical way without excessive verbiage or attempts to be clever. One competing book spent 3 entire pages on how to use a 1901 compass design!

7. It warns you of the inaccuracies of some improvised 'navigational' methods (like telling directions from a wristwatch and the sun) while still giving you useful information on methods that do work well enough for emergency.

8. While it has the mandatory chapter on GPS, it does not attempt to be a 'all-method navigation' book. Such a book does not exist. Either the GPS material will be inadequate (because no general GPS book can cover each model of GPS and their widely varying operational characteristics in different outdoor environments) or the map/compass material is too abbreviated. IF you want to learn to use a GPS in conjunction with map compass, my advice is to learn map/compass navigation, direction-finding, and position plotting FIRST, then get a GPS and its factory instruction manual and learn to use it.

This book is the best resource on land navigation i've seen. I use it regularly in teaching land navigation in conjunction with search and rescue to area fire departments. The author makes the hard-to-explain easy to understand for beginners and experts alike.