FIND YOUR WAY

LAND NAV LESSONS WITH THE NATURE RELIANCE SCHOOL ARE NOT LOST ON STUDENTS.

- Mike Travis

Over the course of the years in which I've engaged in survival training, one of my most daunting subjects has always been land navigation.

Reading maps, using a compass and applying those skills in the field always felt like equal parts advanced mathematics and witchcraft. I read many books and articles and typically came away just as confused as when I started.

Latitude, declination, degrees, bearings; it always made my head spin. Hands-on teaching helped to demystify some of this, but never to the point at which I was comfortable with the subject.

Much to my shame, land navigation remained a weakness in my skill set for a very long time. But, having spoken with many students of survival over the years, I've found that I'm not alone in this deficiency.

All this changed with my discovery of a book called Essential Wilderness Navigation by Craig Caudill and Tracy Trimbal. I was familiar with Caudill from his other books, Extreme Wilderness Survival and Ultimate Wilderness Gear, as well as his YouTube channel, Nature Reliance.

Caudill writes in a way that's logical and easy for me to understand, so I decided to have another go at learning land navigation. This time, however, I decided it was time to go back to school-Caudill's Nature Reliance School (NatureReliance.org), to be exact.

INTRO TO LAND NAVIGATION

I joined Caudill's recent, one-day “Introduction to Land Navigation class at the Red Rock Lodge. It's located on 4,000 acres near Sugarloaf, Pennsylvania, and draws students from Ohio, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.