Handrails And Backstops You Can Trust
Okay. We've matched ridges and drainages to paper. Your eye is starting to trust the map instead of just tolerating it. Now let's talk about the two things that will actually keep you found: handrails and backstops.
A handrail is any long feature you can follow. A trail, a ridge line, a river, a power line cut, a canyon wall. You walk alongside it and it does most of the navigating for you. A backstop is a feature that tells you "you've gone too far, stop." A road you'd cross. A river you'd hit. A fence line. If you reach it, you know something.
These two ideas are Low Key more useful day to day than a perfect bearing. A bearing tells you a direction. A handrail and a backstop tell you when you're right and when you've blown it. That's the whole system.
Finding your handrail at home
Grab the trailhead map you've been practicing with, or pull up a topo of somewhere you actually hike. Look for a line that runs the direction you'd be walking. Not a straight line necessarily, just something continuous. A trail counts. A drainage counts. The base of a ridge counts.
Trace it with your finger. Ask yourself: if I lost the trail itself, could I still follow this feature by staying near it? A creek is a great handrail because even if you wander off it a little, you can hear it and correct back. A ridge works the same way, you can drift off the crest and still feel the ground fall away on both sides and know you're near it.
Bad handrails are the ones that are too short or too subtle. A little unnamed side drainage that dries up halfway isn't going to help you. You want something that runs most of the length of your route.
Finding your backstop
Now look past where you're actually planning to stop. What's the next big thing out there. On a lot of the trails up the canyons around here, that's a road, a parking area, or the trail hitting a river crossing. If you're aiming for a saddle and you somehow walk past it without noticing, what would stop you eventually. That's your backstop.
This matters because it turns "I think I went too far" into "I know I went too far." Without a backstop in your head, you can wander for a long time on a maybe. With one, you get a hard no. You hit the road, you know you overshot, you turn around.
I picked this habit up mostly by getting it wrong first, same as most of this class. Early on I'd have a rough direction in my head and just kind of go, trusting I'd feel it when I got close. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes I walked way past where I should've stopped because nothing told me to stop. Now I don't move until I know what my backstop is. Cheap insurance.
The moving bearing problem
Here's an honest gap of mine. I cannot take a bearing smoothly while I'm walking. I've tried. My compass wobbles, my feet aren't level, I get a reading that's off by twenty degrees and I don't trust it. Some people can do it. I'm not one of them, and I've stopped pretending otherwise.
So here's what I actually do, and what I'd tell you to do too. Plant your feet. Take the reading standing still, square to your target. Then walk. If you need another check, stop again, take it again. It costs you thirty seconds. It's honest and it's fast enough for anything you're doing on a day hike.
This ties right back to handrails, because if you've got a good handrail, you don't need to keep taking bearings anyway. You're just following the feature and glancing at the map to confirm. Bearings are for when there's no handrail to lean on. That's a smaller number of situations than people think.
Practicing this without leaving the house
You don't need terrain for this part. Pull out any map, even a street map of American Fork or wherever you live. Pick a route. Find a handrail on it, a road or a canal or a rail line that runs alongside where you'd walk. Then find the backstop, the thing that would tell you if you overshot. Do this five or six times on different routes until it's automatic to ask both questions before you go anywhere.
The parking lot version of this is the same thing I keep telling you across this whole class. Practice it boring before you need it exciting. If you can't spot a handrail on a map at your kitchen table, you're not going to spot one halfway up a canyon with your legs tired and the light going.
One real caution here. A backstop only helps if you actually notice when you cross it. Daydreaming past your backstop defeats the whole point. If you know a road is your limit, actually watch for the road. Don't just trust that you'll feel it.
Before next time
Take a map of somewhere you know and find one handrail and one backstop on it before we meet again. Doesn't need to be fancy, just needs to be a real answer to "what would I follow" and "what would tell me I've gone too far."
Thanks, Jason