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More copies of this ISBN:

The Essential Wilderness Navigator (Essential)

by David Seidman

The Essential Wilderness Navigator (Essential) Cover

ISBN13: 9780071361101
ISBN10: 0071361103
Condition: Standard
All Product Details

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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

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.

Synopsis:

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.

Description:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 162) and index.

About the Author

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction

What's New in this Edition

1. A Sense of Direction

Locating Your Sixth Sense

How Not to Get Lost

Why We Get Lost

How to "Get Found"

2. Maps

The World in Your Hands

Types of Maps

Three Dimensions into Two

The Language of Maps

Reading the Terrain

Latitude and Longitude

Scale

Distance

Direction

Putting Yourself on the Map

Map Care and Gear

3. 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

4. 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

A Bearing from a Mapped Object

Other Lines of Position

Warning Bearings

Crossing Lines of Position

Returning to the Same Spot

A Running Fix

Finding Distance Off

Measuring Distance Covered

Dead Reckoning

5. Navigation in Use

Route Planning

The Practice of Navigation

On the Trail

Hitting What You Aim For

Landmarks as Guides

Sources of Error

When You Are Lost

6. 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

The Southern Cross

Other Stars

7. Extreme Environments

Mountains

Snow

Deserts

8. Electronic Navigation

GPS 101

Getting Started

E-Maps: Topos and Charts on CD-ROM

9. 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

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
Peter, December 30, 2006 (view all comments by Peter)
You want to learn how to use a map and compass? For navigating on land, especially remote wilderness? This is the best comprehensive book I've found on the subject, bar none. Reasons:

1. It gets to the point quickly in teaching you map & compass fundamentals. No fluff, no wasted time on esoteric principles of magnetism, rules of orienteering competitions (a fine sport, but one bearing little resemblance to actual wilderness navigation with its special large-scale magnetic-north maps and simplified compasses etc.) Instead, this book concentrates on one objective: accurate land navigation in a wilderness environment.

2. It teaches realistic methods, and does not emphasize the unrealistic ones (one glaring example: penciling a lot of inaccurate magnetic declination lines all over your map the night before your trip (because the author used the method once for an adventure race with a special large-scale map and thinks it's cool) instead of just buying a compass with adjustable declination or pasting a pointer indicating a true bearing on your compass baseplate! Hey, sitting atop a windblown mountain is no place to attempt to draw magnetic lines of declination with a three-inch compass baseplate when you walk off your pre-marked map or have to use a friend's copy!

3. It has large, clear, easy-to-follow illustrations. Believe me, this is a rarity in most map/compass books.

4. It teaches BOTH compass dead reckoning (compass only) AND terrain association (map priority) navigation principles and shows the advantages and weaknesses of each in a given situation. Some orienteering-biased books would have you believe the compass is only good for aligning a map to magnetic north!

5. It has nice large pages and lays flat while you refer to various sections and practice using your map & compass. Don't laugh. Remember, you will learn land navigation by practicing outdoors what you're reading. One session of trying to refer to the tiny pocket paperback pages and dingy photos of competing books will make you a believer in a large-paged instruction book with clear illustrations.

6. It covers more advanced map/compass skills (such as plotting your position using lat/long and UTM grids, resection, etc.) as well as beginner exercises, and does so in the same clear, practical way without excessive verbiage or attempts to be clever. One competing book spent 3 entire pages on how to use a 1901 compass design!

7. It warns you of the great inaccuracies of some improvised 'navigational' methods (like telling directions from a wristwatch and the sun) while still giving you useful information on finding direction from Polaris and other methods that do work well enough for emergency navigation.

8. While it has the mandatory chapter on GPS, it does not attempt to be a 'all-method navigation' book. Such a book does not exist. Either the GPS material will be inadequate (because no general GPS book can cover each model of GPS and their widely varying operational characteristics in different outdoor environments) or the map/compass material is too abbreviated.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780071361101
With:
Cleveland, Paul
Other:
Erikson, Christine
With:
Cleveland, Paul
Author:
Seidman, David
Author:
Cleveland, Paul
Author:
Erikson, Christine
Publisher:
International Marine Publishing
Location:
Camden, Me.
Subject:
Outdoor Skills
Subject:
Physical Education
Subject:
Navigation
Subject:
Wilderness survival
Subject:
Orientation
Subject:
navigation,Wilderness Navigator,compass,maps,basics,second edition,Outdoors,environment,global positioning system,snow,eye-opening advice,Adventure West
Copyright:
Edition Number:
2
Edition Description:
McGraw-Hill
Series:
Essential (McGraw-Hill)
Series Volume:
vol. 31
Publication Date:
December 2000
Binding:
Paperback
Grade Level:
College/higher education:
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
173
Dimensions:
9.17x7.33x.27 in. .77 lbs.

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