Orienteering

[glennbad]

Being a novice when it comes to alot of "outdoor" things, an opportunity came up last weekend.

As a Boy Scout leader, I was asked to get the word out to the Troop on a cool little training in our area. The State of NH was sponsoring an Orienteering course at a small state forest in our area. A local orienteering group was providing instruction on basic map & compass type stuff. Sadly, only 2 boys in our troop were interested. So the 3 if us went anyway. The cost was $5 for adults, kids free. Hard to beat that.

I found the training to be quite informative. In my mind, a compass just showed you where north was. Who needs all those other lines and numbers, ha-ha. After some initial instruction, they had some practical exercises set up in a field outside the main building. One was a game where there was a circle of stakes, each with a letter. They gave you a paper with a stake letter, then a bunch of compass bearings. You started at the first letter, dialed in your compass bearing, went to that stake, then you write down that letter, and so on... If you make one mistake, it screws you up the rest of the way. The boys enjoyed that game.

After some more classroom time, they cut us loose on 3 courses in the forest. The boys really enjoyed this, and didn't seem to realize that they were learning something in the process. I was impressed at what I had learned, and embarrassed at what I didn't know.

This stuff is probably basic 101 for alot of you. I, however, will never look at a compass the same way. The 2 boys, one of them my son, hopefully gained some good knowledge and confidence that they can take with them on their next camping or hiking trip.

So, anybody do orienteering competitions? Any stories??

Thanks for reading...

Glenn

 

[on_the_edge]

Interesting. For anybody who can't get to some type of course, there is plenty of reading to be found on the Internet. Eg.

http://www.learn-orienteering.org/old/

 

[flybri]

thanks for sharing, glennbad! i'm a scout leader up here in canada, and i recently taught a basic compass session for the leaders on my team. i've found that map and compass skills, while readily found in outdoors and scouting books, seem to have been lost over the years, partly because trails are so well marked nowadays. glad to see that there are others like me who are re-learning some lost skills =)

 

[x39]

A timely topic. I'm going to sign up at the local community college for a three part course on land compass navigation, ocean navigation, and GPS, with each preceding course being a prerequisite for the latter. I'm pretty well versed in map and compass, but am still looking forward to the map and compass section. The ocean navigation and GPS will be new ground for me. Should be fun.

 

[kr1]

As a sargent in charge of a recon squad I taught land nav in the army. After I got out I started competing in orienteering and have been teaching it to scouts and others for over 20 years now.

A great sport but make sure you understand it is a sport. Actual land navigation or bushwacking requires a few more skills to learn but it is a great sport and a great starter for such activities.

KR

 

[Horned Toad]

Sadly, only 2 boys in our troop were interested. So the 3 if us went anyway. Glenn

I would think this would be mandatory for any Scout that plans on leaving the pavement, is there also not a merit badge this can apply to??

 

[glennbad]

It is a 1st class scout requirement, IIRC.

But I agree, that should be a basic requisite for any boy scout. Maybe if they were a little better versed in map and compass, then we wouldn't be reading about these scouts that get lost from time to time. However, we are our own worst enemy, as we get farther away from nature and the outdoors, we lose our familiarization with it. Then it becomes foreign to us.

Glenn

 

[Watchful]

A few years back I did a security design for a high school located deep in the middle of a forest. No town within many miles of there.

I was delighted to hear that the first thing they were going to teach the kids in orientation was, in fact, Orientation. They were going to teach all the freshmen and new students the ability to find their way back to the campus using a variety of means, simply due to the liability of them getting lost on the sprawling, wooded campus.

Imagine that--an entire high school of kids, year after year, learning mandatory survival skills as part of the curriculum.

 

[fnc]

I have studied Map and Compass and used them with
great success in the field. Most do not have the skills
or equipment (good compass) to find a line-of-position.

Finding a line-of-postion is a critical skill in navigation.

Other skills.
Finding a general direction and maintaining a general course,
in that direction, are important, and they contribute to
finding your position by the dead reckoning (DR) method.
For land navigation, DR has serious shortcommings, especially
with the estimating Distance part.

That is why finding your position by intersecting lines-of-postition
is so important. If you can identiify landmarks, you can take sights
on those landmarks, yielding lines-of-postion. Where lines-of-position
intersect, on the map, is your position, using this model.

In the sport of Orieneering, you can use both DR and LOP, so
where is the problem?
The sport is biased toward those who run or walk fast;
though, nav skills and route finding are rewarded also.
It does contribute a great deal to taking sights i.e. the fast
and easy way to take sights. That is a a great benefit to the
rest of us (methods and equipment), who are not in the sport.

For most of us, most of the time, the fast methods are more than
adequate. However, there are times where finding your positon
(accurately and with certainty) is critical. Two examples of these
times are 1) before descending a drainage 2) finding (or recording
the position of) a cache, camp, or cabin.

frank