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Comment by SkittyDog | Hacker News Reader

When you're traveling off trail, it's not enough to simply have a map & compass... You need to learn how to interpret a topographic map, and recognize the terrain around you. That takes time & effort.

It's a very useful skill, and worth learning if you're going outdoors. But it's not as simple as looking at road maps and reading street signs.

Coincidentally, there is a great Sierra Club program in Los Angeles & Orange County that teaches off-trail navigation (among other skills)... It's called the Wilderness Travel Course, and it's great fun. I believe the Mountaineers in the PNW also teach those skills as part of their leadership program.

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If someone wants to get idea of how hard it can be, without leaving house ...

Playing Death Stranding comes close.

Obviously game has realtime location/map, with isometric/topographic view also available, which makes it much easier than it would be in real world - reading off a paper map and guestimating where on that map you might be.

So basically try to check map and plan the route (e.g. reach a river/canyon/house/junction and then go left) ahead, and then either don't check the map (because it shows exactly where you are), or have a screenshot of it from before you left one of drop locations.

"You need to learn how to interpret a topographic map, and recognize the terrain around you. That takes time & effort."

And you can still make mistakes that throw off your navigation. In the past, I participated in a sport that involved navigating through terrain for up to 24 hours (through the night) looking for targets. The compass work was never much of an issue (more a process), but making decisions based on the terrain was - is that the third gully since we left the spur or the fourth? And issues typically compound.

> issues typically compound

Nobody appreciates the rapidity and magnitude with which this happens until they’ve experienced it. It’s a very good experience to have so you can recognize it and hopefully stop the momentum of failure.

Definitely. In one example, we were following a bearing and counting gullies. It was hard to tell what would or wouldn't constitute a gully relative to our map contours. We ended up several hundred metres off course, on the wrong side of a ridge, and a target that should've taken 20 minutes to reach took 90 minutes. That was the Australasian Championship, so serious terrain, and you burn energy wandering around trying to work out where you went wrong.

I thought it was assumed in GP that one should also know how to use said tools and therefore found myself nodding. But yeah, learning how to triangulate your position on a map and read terrain should be a requirement for anyone going outdoors, long before buying a Garmin inreach. The inreach is for severe endgame mode, it’s not to be regarded as a tool that lets you be “outdoorsy” without survival and navigation skills.

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