Orienteering

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Contents

Overview

Orienteering is a specialty form of hiking where, instead of using navigation as a way to get where you're going, navigation is actually the whole idea, with the mountains, valleys, streams, and bears just happy side effects.

Why? Well, first of all, it's fun! When you mix orienteering with a GPS, throw in a bunch of web sites, and you have the sport of geocaching. Not a good enough reason? Orienteering is also the best way to learn, and brush-up on your navigation, compass, map, and just general route finding skills. Do a little orienteering every now and then and maybe you won't need to panic the next time that mountain you were hiking to appears to have been replaced by a huge valley.

Required Gear

Orienteering doesn't require a lot of gear. It's really all about the skills.

  • Compass: A good orienteering compass. These are dirt cheap, and should always be in the bottom of your pack, anyway. If you're orienteering, just move the compass to the top.
  • Map: Not always used, or at least not always brought out of the pack after leaving your car.
  • Vector list: This is what you carry. A vector is just a direction (North, 73 degrees, south-southwest, etc), and a distance (700 meters, 1/2 mile, etc). A vector list is just a sequence of vectors.

Yep. That's it. Some people also bring a GPS (if you're geocaching). Pencil and paper is sometimes also useful, but not strictly required.

Required Skills

  • Compass reading: You need to be able to not only read a compass, but actually understand what you're doing with it, including things like adjusting for magnetic declination.
  • Map reading: Whether you're trying to plot a route from point A (the parking lot) to point B (the secret waterfall?), looking for a way to get around a collapsed bridge in backcountry, or even trying to find out where you are, knowing how to read a map can make the difference between heading straight to your destination and being hopeless lost (or at least wandering around for hours).

Orienteering Activities

Following A Route

You're given a piece of paper. You have your compass. Your goal is a small plastic box laying on the forest floor. Go. You're orienteering.

The piece of paper contains instructions like:

  1. 37 degrees, 290 meters
  2. 117 degrees, 705 meters
  3. 64 degrees, 1407 meters
  4. ...

You're following an orienteering route. Take out your compass, set your magnetic declination, point it to 37 degrees, then go 290 meters in that direction. Easy, right? Well, what about that lake 25 meters ahead of you? Swim it? Walk around it, correcting for the fact that you had to walk a kilometer out of your way? That's the challenge of orienteering.

Techniques for Following a Route

This section needs to be written

Finding A Route

Following a route is the recreational method of orienteering, and the learning/practice method, too. When you're out in the wild, though, it's different. Orienteering skills in the backcountry are more commonly used to get to a distant location when you don't have trails. Normally, this means:

  • You know where you are on the map. You know where you want to be. Chart out a route on the map.
  • You see something in the distance and you want to get there. Maybe it's a waterfall, maybe it's smoke from a fire. Whatever it is, you take a bearing, estimate a distance, and head out.

The challenge is that you will not necessarily be able to see your destination very often.

Techniques for Finding a Route

This section needs to be written

Finding Where You Are

This is really orienteering done backwards. You don't know where you are. You may not even know where you're going. If you're lucky, you have a map and can figure out enough points of reference that you can triangulate your position. If you're less lucky, maybe you just see a hilltop you want to get to for a better view, or some line off in the distance that you hope might be a road (which brings you back to the idea of finding a route).

Techniques for Finding Where You Are

  • When you don't know where you are, you're probably lost. See the article on being lost.
  • Triangulate your position using a map and compass, then map out a route out.
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