3 Natural Navigation tips for everyday travel

Learning to tune into the natural environment and see clues which can get you navigate is a wonderful, and vast, skillset. A skillset which will open your senses, and connect you with the land you’re travelling through. Don’t get me wrong, I advocate the use of a map and compass as you would expect, and we run a suite of navigation courses to develop those techniques. But often having your nose in a map, literally and figuratively, can distance you from the actual terrain through which you’re traversing, and it’s very likely the whole reason you’re outdoors is to ‘be’ with the land.

Natural way marks and guideposts then can be a visceral way to engage with the journey you’re on. The field is expansive, nuanced, and subjective. It can therefore feel overwhelming and off-putting when compared to the simple compass and map. A great place to start are the richly detailed books of Tristan Gooley, which are still a source of research and inspiration to me several years after first reading them. The Natural Navigator was the first book of Tristans I read, I think over 7 years ago now, and I must say I pick it up about once a month now for one reason or another.

If we’re just starting out then, it can be great to just let our eyes stray a little from the trail and observe some natural features and ask the simple question, why? Why does X look like that? Could I infer any information from this?

Here are 3 simple observations to whet your stone, and start that slow irreversible process of sharpening your skills.

Wind and Bracken

One of my favourite means of keeping a sense of direction when walking in bracken covered heathland is to note the way dead bracken lays down. When bracken dies each year, it dies slowly and is slowly laid down by winds over time. This means you get a good average wind direction over the course of several weeks, roughly the predominant wind direction for that part of the country. In the UK our predominant winds blow in from the South-west, therefore bending bracken down towards the North-east. You can use this tangent to get a pretty consistent guide over a large area.

Moon marker

The moon can be used in several ways, some of which are detailed in The Natural Navigator book I mentioned, but a quick and simple one is this: When we see a half moon as in the photo above, the ‘flat’ side can be used to point you south. By extending a line from the flat edge down towards the horizon you get a roughly south guide, you can do the same by connecting the ‘horns’ of a crescent moon as in my doodle on right of the sky above. This isn’t a highly accurate method, but it’s great for getting a general idea of which broad direction you’re looking.

The Sun

This last tip is more of a mindset and a specific trick. My advice, if you’re interesting in entering the world of natural navigation, is to pay attention to the sun. The suns light and warmth influence every aspect of life on Earth, and plant-life lives and dies via access to it’s life giving power. It rises in the east, but only exactly east on the equinox; setting westward in the same fashion. If you live in the northern hemisphere we view the sun always in the south of our skies, and it makes sense that midway through our day the sun is midway through it’s journey from east to west. So the noon sun sits directly south in the sky.

If you listen to the sun, it’s shadows, it’s dance across the sky, and begin to understand it’s influence on the trees and plants, you’ll be well on your way to becoming comfortable to reading nature for your compass.

I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope you find it useful in your journeys.

If you’d like to join us on a natural navigation day course, you can find out more here…

Do check out Tristans books and resources too, you’ll never go on a walk in the same way again.

Until next time,

JD