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

As in all the "Essential" series titles, the text is woven page by page with sidebars, photos, and drawings to create a highly visual reading experience. This combination is uniquely effective in propelling the reader to a fundamental mastery of map and compass use. But The Essential Wilderness Navigator does more than teach the disciplines of reading compasses and interpreting topographical maps, important as these are. It includes exercises for developing our sixth sense of spatial awareness-what psychologist call cognitive maps. It offers tips for reading nature's highway signs, from vegetation bands, to wind ripples in snow or sand, to the sun and stars. It covers the particular challenges of mountain, snow, and desert navigation. It summarizes the research on how and why men and women navigate differently. And above all, it teaches the language and thought processes of the experienced navigator. To understand bearing, lines of position, baselines, bracketing, aiming off, and catch points is to know how to use these techniques, consciously at first, but later with unconscious mastery.

Maps and a compass are the hiker's insurance against getting lost in the woods. But you'll need to be able to do more with these tools than locate Fresno or head south. Seidman, a world traveler and master kayaker, charts the subtleties of map interpretation (especially the ups and downs of contour lines) and offers instruction on how to use a compass for taking bearings and walking a course. Other techniques for finding your way in the woods are explained: estimating distances by finger angles or winking, adjusting your compass for true north, and finding directions from the motions of the sun and stars. By the way, forget about moss growing on the north side of trees; lichens like moisture, which more often depends on prevailing winds and weather than direction. This book is filled with illustrations and practical advice to keep the careful trekker on the right path. Even armchair travelers will find some valuable advice here. Jennifer Henderson