The Essential Wilderness Navigator

As in all the "Essential" series titles, the text is woven page by page with sidebars, photos, and drawings to create a highly visual reading experience. This combination is uniquely effective in propelling the reader to a fundamental mastery of map and compass use. But The Essential Wilderness Navigator does more than teach the disciplines of reading compasses and interpreting topographical maps, important as these are. It includes exercises for developing our sixth sense of spatial awareness-what psychologist call cognitive maps. It offers tips for reading nature's highway signs, from vegetation bands, to wind ripples in snow or sand, to the sun and stars. It covers the particular challenges of mountain, snow, and desert navigation. It summarizes the research on how and why men and women navigate differently. And above all, it teaches the language and thought processes of the experienced navigator. To understand bearing, lines of position, baselines, bracketing, aiming off, and catch points is to know how to use these techniques, consciously at first, but later with unconscious mastery.