The Essential Wilderness Navigator: How to Find Your Way in the Great Outdoors, Second Edition (Essential (McGraw-Hill))

Now with full-color topographic maps and featuring the latest on electronic navigation, The Essential Wilderness Navigator is the clearest and most up-to-date route-finding primer available. Providing readers with exercises for developing a directional 'sixth sense, ' tips on mastering the art of map- and compass-reading, and comprehensive updates on a range of technological advances, this perennially popular guide is more indispensable than ever. Read more... Abstract: Teaches readers how to observe - to see, smell, hear, and sense the details of the environment around them. This guide includes: the basics of global positioning system (GPS) navigation and CD-ROM maps; a color section on reading topographical maps. Read more...

The Essential Series—Your Trusted Guides

Puts the world of wilderness navigation in the palm of your hand.—Adventure West

Teaches the essential disciplines of compass and map-reading . . . but goes beyond the basics with useful, eye-opening advice on how to read nature's highway signs—vegetation bands, wind-whipped ripples in sand or snow, and the positions of the sun and stars.—Northeast Outdoors

If you're at all unsure of your backwoods direction-finding skills, The Essential Wilderness Navigator is the guide you've been looking for. It teaches you how to observe—to see, smell, hear, and sense the details of the environment around you. Then, to supplement your newly enhanced sense of direction, you'll learn to read maps, use a compass, and find your location and route with reference to landmarks. This updated second edition also includes

• The basics of global positioning system (GPS) navigation and CD-ROM maps
• A full-color section on reading topographical maps
• Navigating in deserts, mountains, and snow

Whether you're planning an extended wilderness trek or a day hike on marked trails, here's how to stay found.

David Seidman has spent a good portion of his life finding his way around the world. He's crossed oceans, toured central Asia and Mongolia without a map or the ability to speak the language, and found a Mayan ruin in Guatemala. He is the author of The Essential Sea Kayaker and The Complete Sailor and is an editor at Boating magazine.

Paul Cleveland has worked as a wilderness ranger in New Mexico and designed and built trails in the Appalachians. He is a frequent contributor to Backpacker and Climbing magazines and the Gorp.com Web pages. He guides whitewater rafting trips and teaches CPR and first aid for the Red Cross and wilderness navigation for Outward Bound.

Content: What's new in this edition -- Sense of direction -- Locating your sixth sense -- How not to get lost -- Why we get lost -- How to "get found" -- Maps: World in your hands -- Types of maps -- three dimensions into two -- Language of maps -- Reading the terrain -- latitude and longitude -- scale -- distance -- direction -- Putting yourself on the map -- Map care and gear -- Compasses: What compasses can do -- Earth's magnetic field -- How compasses work -- Make your own -- declination -- Compass types -- Orienting your compass to magnetic north -- Orienting your compass to geographic north -- Bearings -- Deviation -- Following a compass course -- Testing your skills -- Navigation: Map and compass combined -- Orienting the map with a compass -- Finding a course from the map -- Locating a mapped object in the field -- Locating an observed object on the map -- Bearing from a mapped object -- Other lines of position -- warning bearings -- Crossing lines of position -- Returning to the same spot -- Running fix -- Finding distance off -- Measuring distance covered -- Dead reckoning -- Navigation in use: Route planning -- Practice of navigation -- On the trail -- Hitting what you aim for -- Landmarks as guides -- Sources of error -- When you are lost -- Looking to nature for clues: Finding north and south at noon -- North and south from a shadow -- Quick but inaccurate -- Movements of sunrise and sunset -- Bearings from sunrise and sunset -- Polaris -- Southern cross -- Other stars -- Extreme environments: Mountains -- Snow -- Deserts -- Electronic navigation: GPS 101 -- Getting started -- E-Maps: Topos and charts on CD-ROM -- Appendix: Bearings of sunrise and sunset -- Declination corrections -- Metric conversion tables -- Orienteering -- Sources of maps, books, compasses, videos, GPS manufacturers, and electronic mapmakers -- Travel Plan -- Index -- Acknowledgments.