Story Time: Land Navigation

Twenty First Post: Story Time: Land Navigation

One time I was doing land navigation at Camp Dawson with my buddy Layman. We had already found the water point and were moving on to our first point. Layman relied more on land marks and I preferred the compass.

There we were shooting the azimuths and keeping our pace count. We reached an area full of brush. We still figured we had a little more distance to go, but all of the sudden there was a cliff about a hundred feet heigh.

We couldn’t figure out how we had reached the river when it was supposed to be many meters away. We were wasting too much time on our first point, and if we couldn’t find our first point there would be no reference to find the others.

We couldn’t figure it out, so we decided to find a way around the cliff. A short distance to the right of the cliff led us to an area that was flat and grassy. And this is where Layman found out the point was in this grassy flat area. He found it on the map, and when we went to the point, it was directly in front of the cliff. You just couldn’t see it from the cliff.

Layman figured out by the contour of the ground that there was a depression and a flat area between the hills. Although it doesn’t sound that exciting reading it from a page, when you do land navigation yourself, you find yourself on a little adventure.