The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
Alright, so far we’ve seen some traditional tools on how to navigate without the need for the sun, but now we want to get to the more accurate and easier to apply tools of navigation, the sun!
Me and my shadow
The first tool in the list is you and your shadow. You can almost always guarantee that when the sun is out, so is your shadow (bonus points for people who can tell me in what situation you would have NO shadow on a sunny day). IF you have half an hour and a couple sticks you can use that to your advantage. Here’s what you do:
- The first thing you’ll want to do is set up a Straight stick directly vertical. This is going to cast the shadow you’ll need.
- Take a marker (small stick, rock or other small object) and place it at the tip of the shadow.
- Every 10 minutes mark where the new tip of the shadow is with other small markers.
- Draw a straight line connecting all the markers together.
- Draw a line perpendicular (at a right angle to) the line drawn in step 4.
This perpendicular line runs North and South. There’s just one more question, which way is north? To find out that you have to know if you’re north of the equator or not. If you are in the Northern Hemisphere the shadow will be on the North side of the stick. Take a look at the following video that shows this trick, but in the Southern Hemisphere (so you’ll see the shadow pointing south).
As always, be careful, be prepared and have fun out there. Make sure you are experienced in outdoor survival if you plan to rely on these tips.
