Bearing To A Landmark You Can See
Okay. Last lesson we planted our feet and got steady before reading the needle. Now let's actually point at something and get a number off it, because that's the whole point of all this.
A bearing to a visible landmark is the easiest bearing you'll ever take. The thing is right there. You can see it. No guessing, no matching terrain to contour lines, none of that. This is Low Key the training-wheels version, and it's also the version you'll use the most in real life. Spotting a peak, a water tower, a saddle between two hills, and turning that into a number you can walk or navigate by.
Here's how you do it, standing in your living room or your driveway right now.
The steps
1. Pick your landmark. Something you can see clearly and that isn't going to move. A tree on the far side of the yard works fine for practice. Up the canyon it'd be a peak, a lookout tower, a distinct notch in a ridge.
2. Hold the compass flat, out in front of you, like we practiced. Point the direction-of-travel arrow (the long one on the baseplate, not the needle) straight at your landmark. Your whole body should be facing it too. Don't just twist your wrist, turn your feet.
3. Keeping the baseplate pointed at the landmark, turn the housing (the dial with the numbers) until the orienting arrow lines up under the red end of the needle. Red in the shed, we've said that before. Don't move the baseplate while you do this part. That's the part people mess up, they nudge the whole compass while they're spinning the dial.
4. Read the number at the index line. That's your bearing. Write it down or just say it out loud to yourself. That number is now how you talk about that landmark's direction.
5. Check declination. Every time. I don't care if you did it five minutes ago. Say it out loud, adjust if your compass doesn't do it automatically. This is a habit, not a memory, and I've paid for skipping it before.
That's it. Four or five steps, maybe thirty seconds once you've done it a bunch of times.
Why this matters more than it looks like it does
Once you can do this reliably, you can do two useful things. You can walk toward something you can see without staring at it the whole time, which matters when the trail dips below tree line and you lose sight of your landmark for a stretch. And you can start triangulating, which is where two or three bearings off different landmarks cross on your map and tell you exactly where you're standing. We'll get there in a couple lessons. It's genuinely one of my favorite things this whole skill does.
A confession about my practice setup
Before I ever taught this in an actual classroom, my youngest, Sophia, made me run through the whole thing in the living room first. I set up three "landmarks" for a demo bearing. A lamp. The TV. A framed photo on the wall. Very scientific.
The kids were not interested in respecting my landmarks. They kept walking through my sight lines while I was trying to line up a bearing on the lamp, and I'd lose my angle and have to start over. I ended up joking that it was my real triangulation training, because if you can hold a bearing steady while a four-year-old cannonballs across your line of sight, you can hold one anywhere.
Point being, practice somewhere boring and a little annoying before you need this somewhere pretty. A parking lot, a backyard, wherever. If you can only do this when it's calm and quiet and nothing's in your way, it's not going to hold up when the wind's blowing and you're trying not to lose the trail.
A word on the number itself
New folks sometimes think the bearing is fragile, like it'll be wrong if you're standing a few feet different than where you took it. It won't. As long as your landmark isn't moving, that bearing is good from a pretty wide range of positions nearby. Don't overthink your exact footing. Get the direction right, that's the job.
One more thing. If you're near a car, a metal fence, a pack with trekking poles strapped to it, get away from that stuff before you take the reading. We covered this a few lessons back but it's worth repeating here because it'll wreck this exercise specifically. A bearing that's 20 degrees off because you were standing next to your truck's tailgate is worse than no bearing at all, because you'll trust it.
Before next time
Go outside, pick three things you can see from your yard or your porch, and take a bearing on each one. Write the numbers down. We'll use them next lesson.
Thanks, Jason