How to Navigate Without a Compass
The real trick behind navigating without a compass is to keep an awareness of your relative position. After all, what good is it to have your bearings and not know the general direction to where you want to go from where you are?
Relative Position
Keeping an awareness of your location in the universe is a good place to start for knowing your relative position in comparison to everywhere else. Unfortunately, that is a bit too broad for this topic. We will have to narrow that down some.
(Example) When you left your house to go hiking you traveled south on I-95 for a while then you went west on I-20 then turned right into the state park. After checking in at the ranger’s station, you turned left on the first dirt road and parked about 5 miles up. In the back of your mind, you should know the general orientation of the world around you, your relative position to where you want to go. The ranger’s station is generally in a southeasterly direction from where you are. Now we can get busy trying to find out which way that is. There are many ways to find north, south, east and west. Below are two easy and accurate methods.
The Sun Moves East to West
One great method for getting your bearings is to establish an east to west line. To do this all you need is the sun, two to three hours of time (approx.), two rocks and a stick around three feet long.
1. Place the stick in the ground (perpendicular).
2. Place one of the rocks at the very end of the shadow line formed by the stick. The accuracy of this method depends on placing the rock right at the tip of the shadow line.
3. Leaving the stick and rock in place, take advantage of the two to three hours (approx.) to sightsee, bug hunt, etc. (Remember, don’t wonder too far… you’re lost in the wilderness.)
4. Back at the stick and rock, you will notice that the shadow line has moved. Take that second rock and place it at the tip of the new shadow line. Yank the stick out of the ground and lay it across the two rocks. You have just made an east to west line.
The first rock you placed is your west point because the sun travels from east to west. When the sun is in the east, shadows cast away from it pointing west.
Time for a direction or Direction in Time
This method for getting your bearings works twofold. First off, if you know the time of day you can quickly and accurately find north. Then to flip it around, if you know where north is (perhaps the stick in the ground method), you can quickly and easily figure out what time of day it is. All you need for this is a 2-3 inch twig (straight), your hand and the sun. My bad, to find the direction we are going to need the time of day. For this example, we will say it is 9 am.
1. Place your hand out in front of you, palm up and fingers together.
2. Place the stick perpendicularly between your middle and ring fingers.
3. Looking down on your hand, rotate your body until the shadow line made by the stick lands where the hour hand of a clock would be if it were 9 am.
4. Follow the direction of your middle finger, it is now pointing north.
Easy enough, now we can head out towards where we want to be.
When traveling cross-country, travel from point to point. Having found the direction you want to travel in choose a natural landmark ahead of you in line with your path of travel, move to it, reconfirm your bearings and choose another landmark, and so on, and so on.
