The key thing here is those landmarks - don't ever try to whip out a compass and walk several hundred meters to where you want to go directly. Satellite maps are great, especially in an urban area, and you can easily navigate without ever pulling out a compass in a built-up area with a lot of recognizable landmarks. The more recent the map you have is, and the more relevant information is on it, the easier this is going to be. I can't stress this enough - the basis here is being able to look at a 2D, simplified representation of the real world and being able to correlate it with a real world situation. if all you really need is a general overview and a basic direction, or if you're in an area with a lot of features that you can recognize both on the ground and on the map. You can use a tourist map, road map, Google Maps printout, etc. MapĪ map of the area you expect to be navigating through. If you have like-minded friends and land available, you can also set up a land navigation course for each other with a reliable GPS and a set of boxes with letters or numbers painted on them to verify you've actually found the right points. Many caches (usually a metal stamp or block with some sort of message on it) are maintained at known coordinates around the world, many in national parks and the like. If that's not appealing, I unironically suggest checking out some of the geo-caching stuff that was popular in the early 2000s when consumer GPS devices were becoming popular. A military base with friendly instructors, as part of a program of instruction and a yearslong commitment, may be helpful here. Unfortunately, practicing land navigation in a rural setting is going to be tricky without a large space to work with, and without the ability to place markers at known locations that you're unaware of how to find yourself without working through the practical problem. None of this, though, is useful without practice, and lots of it. You can find complete Army and Marine Corps guides to land navigation online easily, and Army Field Manuals are available for purchase on Amazon and the like. Searching "USMC/Army land navigation class" will pop up the same stuff that's used for training in the first page of results. As a result, your best bet for learning basic land navigation is going to be to self-study with some of the many, many publicly-available military manuals and educational material available online. Unsurprisingly, the people who know the most about land navigation are probably the people spending a lot of time practicing it. Like anything else, knowing how to use your equipment is perhaps more important than the exact kind of equipment your using, and you can do pretty well with navigating without even a compass if you're good at terrain associating. I'll break it down into a couple points: Training You can apply the same concepts in both urban and rural areas to great effect. The bottom line is that land navigation is a useful but perishable skill, as others have said, and is helpful just in daily life on a basic level. I won't go into details into the "how" of navigating, but I'll throw in some tips and pointers to where you can learn. So others have given good overviews of main considerations, but I've got time to blow and hopefully can provide some direct answers to all your points.
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