How do you navigate?
Adapted from a message to Gili after she asked on behalf of a friend of hers who was inspired by my walk to begin one of their own.
Where are you going? How do you navigate? What if you get lost?
I see navigation as two interwoven idea pairs, feeling & intuition and knowledge & mapping.
Feeling & intuition
Sometimes it’s less about knowing where to go, and more about narrowing the field. The best way I know to do that is to set a destination, where doesn’t matter too much, just so long as it’s a good distance away.
A theme can be useful too. Once I reached the Balkans I decided I’d climb the highest peak in each country I walk through. Even if I don’t yet know anything else about a country, this gives me a heading, and from there I’m freed to discover the land I’m wandering through.
As intuitions go, I benefit from having quite a strong sense of direction, I’m confident making my own routes through the mountains by reading contour lines, planning mountain passes etc. If that’s not your style then look for established trails/routes. It can be good to push outside of your comfort zone, but listening to your instincts will signal what kind of walking you want to do. Listen to what your feet, legs, head, and heart have to say for deciding which mode to be in and for how long. It isn’t necessary to enjoy every moment of a journey like this, but if you’re not enjoying most of it you’re probably not listening to what your body is telling you.
My destination is quite far away, and I’m not in a hurry, but I do also have a sense of wanting to get there within this lifetime. So sometimes I do long sections of road walking to cover ground more quickly, sometimes I spend months almost exclusively in the mountains, but most often I do a hybrid of the two: walking (preferably small) roads to get from one set of peaks/mountains to the next.
Knowledge & mapping
I use digital maps almost exclusively — except for 10 days in the Swiss Alps after a rainstorm killed my supposed-to-be-waterproof phone. I spent those ten days mostly feeling my way through the mountains, which was lovely in its own way.
For maps I use Osmand, which pulls mapping data from the OpenStreetMap1 project. I pay €30 a year for the Pro version because I use it all the time, and it has been my trusty companion for all of my big trips. While not perfect, the OpenStreetMap project covers a lot more trails and routes than any other database. Because of that it may seem a bit more visually confusing to someone using it for the first time, especially if they’re used to using the very simple Google Maps etc but once you get used to it it is fantastically useful. I lean on it mightily for contour lines when I’m route finding at altitude or descending into a ravine.
Using a map effectively means looking ahead too. I’m terrible at this. I usually just wake up and start walking, I rarely have more than a days worth of walking ‘planned out’, often not even an hour.
That said, the key limiting factors for my style of long distance walking are water and food. If I’m going to be in the mountains for 7+ days then I force myself to plan ahead a little bit while I’m still somewhere I can do a big resupply, and think about where I’ll next be able to get food.
More important than food is water. If I’m going into the high mountains and making up my own route I’ll usually use satellite images to check if there are likely to be alpine lakes etc, but take into consideration the season the images were taken (a lake or spring that exists in the winter may be dry in the summer).
It’s late and I need to sleep so I’ll leave it there for now, except to say, don’t get too much in your head about navigation, and don’t bury your head in a map either. Maps are terrific, but they also have a terrible power to flatten the world, to hide its magic, and steal its wonder.
The map appears to us more real than the land.
Moving through the world on your own two feet is an unbeatable vehicle to reconnect with the intuition we forget we have, to play.
TLDR Trust your intuition, ask questions, wander far, and you’ll find no shortage of wonder :)
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OpenStreetMap is an initiative to create and provide free geographic data, such as street maps, to anyone. The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an international not-for-profit organization supporting, but not controlling, the OpenStreetMap Project. It is dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anyone to use and share.
— OpenStreetMap Foundation
