Outdoors, Navigation & Survival
Knowing where you are without being told.
9 topics · 13 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Be Expert with Map and Compass
Björn Kjellström · 1955
Orienteering technique — reading contours, setting a bearing, walking it accurately — can be taught as a series of small, drillable steps, and the…
+5 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Air Navigation
United States War Department · 1940
Field manual FM 1-30: an aircraft's position between fixes is best tracked by disciplined dead-reckoning arithmetic — heading, speed, time and known…
+4 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The American Practical Navigator
Nathaniel Bowditch · 1802
The standing reference on celestial and practical navigation — corrected and reissued by the US government for over two centuries, and public domain…
+1 more at this level
12 of 13 works
Björn Kjellström
Orienteering technique — reading contours, setting a bearing, walking it accurately — can be taught as a series of small, drillable steps, and the book that introduced Swedish orienteering method to English-speaking readers.
Ordnance Survey
Sets out the three-step procedure for transferring a bearing between map and compass, and why the housing must be turned to the map's grid lines rather than to north.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ordnance Survey
Explains what scale actually costs you: the 1:25,000 sheet shows field boundaries and walls you can navigate by, while 1:50,000 covers ground faster and loses exactly those features.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ordnance Survey
Explains that contour spacing is the only thing on a map that tells you steepness, so reading the gaps rather than the lines is what lets you judge a route before walking it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Tristan Gooley (TEDx Talks)
Argues that sun, wind, plants and puddles carry enough directional information to navigate without instruments, and that the skill is noticing rather than memorising.
link checked 17 Sept 2026National Park Service
Most backcountry rescues start with a plan that never accounted for the actual route, and works through choosing a route to the group's ability, timing it against terrain and weather, and leaving it with someone who will notice if it fails.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States War Department
Field manual FM 1-30: an aircraft's position between fixes is best tracked by disciplined dead-reckoning arithmetic — heading, speed, time and known wind — not by intermittent landmarks.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Coast Guard
Collisions at sea are prevented by every vessel following the same fixed rules for right of way, lights and sound signals, and this is the US Coast Guard's official text of the international and inland versions together.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of the Army
Field manual FM 21-26: a soldier who can read contour lines, grid references and declination correctly needs no other instrument to move confidently across unfamiliar terrain.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center
A single, cheap jammer or a spoofed signal can silently defeat GPS across an entire region, and argues that systems which depend on it for safety need an independent backup, not a more accurate receiver.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Department of the Army
The US Army's standard reference for navigating by map and compass without electronic aids, including terrain association — matching ground features to the map rather than tracking a plotted course and bearing.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Nathaniel Bowditch
The standing reference on celestial and practical navigation — corrected and reissued by the US government for over two centuries, and public domain throughout.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026