Boundary Waters Quetico Forum :: Listening Point - General Discussion :: Bring enough compass
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plander |
MikeinMpls: "On a solo probably 15 years ago I ran into two guys on the portage from the Pine River into Clove Lake. They said they were turned around. They had a map and I asked them where they were. They pointed to somewhere they were not. I told them that their current location was off the map sheet they were using. Fortunately, I had another and I gave it to them. Agreed! Orienteering is a valuable skill not taught much anymore. Owning a compass and knowing that it points North is not orienteering and the compass itself may not be of much help if you find yourself lost in the wilderness. While I may not use them much, I would never head into the backcountry without a map and compass. |
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fadersup |
The only time I've really used a compass to get "unlost" was hiking in SD. The trail just kind of disappeared in the woods and a storm was coming in. Had a simple park map in hand and used the compass to figure out the general direction back toward the car. |
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scottiebaldwin |
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straighthairedcurly |
TrailZen: "Map & compass in the bow, map & compass in the stern. Trust but verify!Absolutely! Map is most important, but I always have a compass handy. I rarely use the compass for precise bearings. However, on big lakes I always take a "reality check" rough bearing. On winding rivers like the Frost, it is very helpful for the exact reason outlined in trstuck's post. Farther north (northern Ontario and Manitoba) I have required a compass in order to paddle across large lakes that were completely fogged in. Nothing more satisfying than setting a compass bearing, paddling through thick fog for an hour and arriving exactly where you planned. Anyone who has yet to read the trip report by sns that he mentions, it is a crazy story and a great read for a cold winter day. My tale of hapless mapless group... On a hike in a large Texas state park one cold (for Texas) winter day, my son and I had a group of twenty somethings ask for our help. They were wondering if we knew where the trailhead was. They had no map and had been depending on a phone, but its battery had died. There were multiple possible trail heads, but I took a wild guess and asked them if they had a maroon Jeep. Yes!, they cried. We sketched out a map for them to get back to their car As they wandered away, I turned to my son and said, "I hope you will never be so stupid as to go for a hike without a map." He reassured me he doesn't like to go anywhere in any wilderness park without a paper map and compass. Good boy! |
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4keys |
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boonie |
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treehorn |
I have certainly had moments of disorientation, as you look for spots on the map to gain your bearings and they don't always appear as you expect them to. Islands, campsites and portage landings seem obvious on a map, but don't always show themselves the way you expect them to. It's part of the fun/adventure of being in the woods I guess...until it isn't. |
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Minnesotian |
Haven't really needed a compass while in the BWCA or Quetico, though I always bring one. Now Philmont, that's a different story. If you don't know compass basics before, you'll get a crash course there. The unwritten rule is that troops should go off-trail and navigate to their next campsite via compass bearing. |
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gravelroad |
2. I make my own maps. 3. Anybody who has set out across Cache Bay without a compass on their way to the Falls Chain made the trip longer than it needs to be. :-) |
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trstuck |
After lunch, we paddled the rest of the lake under increasingly overcast skies and entered the Frost River which was flowing toward us at a very good clip, owning to the high water levels we had experienced everywhere on this trip. This fact alone is what should have saved us from the headache ahead, but we didn’t realize it until afterward. Due to the high water (a) every curve in the river pushed the bow of the canoe away from the desired direction of travel and into the banks, making us both fight to turn the corner and slowing us down, and (b) portages were not where they were marked on the map. We’re not sure what portages we did take or if they matched any on the map, and since the Frost is narrow and very zig-zaggy, it was hard to make progress through all the turns. All of this led to confusion as to how far we had actually gone, and an accurate sense of time eluded us. Looking at the map, we knew that the river would turn northeast from the southeasterly direction from which it started. And we knew that we didn’t want to miss the 65-rod portage into Pencil Lake, or we’d continue northwest into a dead end. Certain we had gone passed the portage, we turned around—a tricky feat in this narrow river with swift current—and backtracked to an area we thought looked like the area surrounding the portage on the map, all the while hunting intently for the trail head. There seemed to be a small stream that came from the direction of Pencil on the map directly south of the landing, and we thought we were currently looking at it. Then it was that we made our mistake; we decided to bushwhack the stream thinking that since we couldn’t find the trail head, we’d be able to reach Pencil via the stream instead. It couldn’t be more than 70 or 80 rods away. Off we went and shortly ran into a beaver dam. Not unlike the narrows in Fente, the water here was deep on both sides of the dam. It was a struggle to (a) get Tom and his pack out of the canoe onto the reeds and cattails so he could stand on the dam and hold the canoe while I got out on the dam and grabbed my pack, (b) get the canoe over the dam, (c) get the packs back in the canoe, and (d) get Tom and myself back into the canoe, all without falling in or loosing hold of the canoe in the current. We discovered and portaged over five separate beaver dams! In some places the stream was so narrow that we could not park the canoe parallel to the dam for either of us to exit. Meanwhile, Tom’s shoe had decided to come apart while traversing these dams, so he mended it with duct tape and, from time to time, we would stop for him to re-wrap it. All this took over an hour and now, shortly after passing a beaver lodge, we were sitting in very little water in an area that looked as if a dam had broken recently, spilling all the water out of the gorge that used to contain it with hills on both sides. This did not look at all like what we expected to see approaching Pencil. We were lost and we knew it. When all else fails, look at your compass. This was mistake number two—not getting a bearing to see what direction we were headed when taking this shortcut bushwhack. I pulled mine out and discovered that we were heading southeast, not northeast as we supposed. “Tom, we’re going the wrong way.” This was a very disconcerting feeling, not knowing quite where we were at 5 o’clock with no campsites between us and our destination eight portages and many miles away. The only thing to do was go back to the Frost River the way we came and get a bearing to see where to go from there. Another forty-five minutes passed before we had re-traversed those five beaver dams and found ourselves back on the Frost River. We checked the compass and discovered that the direction of travel up the Frost would be taking us east instead of north, so, referring to our maps, we determined that we had not come nearly far enough on the Frost and had taken a stream heading southeast just south of tiny Seat Lake. We should have traveled nearly a mile farther on the Frost! So much for missing the 65-rod portage to Pencil. Off we went, continuing our voyage against the current of the Frost to try once again to find the portage. In the end, we did go past it, as it wasn’t obvious, and had to turn around yet again, still a bit uncertain as to whether this really was the 65-rod portage to Pencil that had eluded us for three hours. The longer we walked this rugged, overgrown trail, the more convinced we were that we were finally on track again, and in short order we found ourselves on Pencil Lake. |
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sns |
I met someone in 2020 however, who had failed to use his. He really, really, really should have used his. Really. |
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gravelroad |
sns: "I navigate most of the time with a compass and maps. GPS on phone for backup. Spent a lot of years looking in the woods and mountains for people like that. Including one who walked right across a trail that would have taken him back to the trailhead ... |
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AirPrex |
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dustytrail |
gravelroad: "1. I taught wilderness navigation for many years and constantly preached the usefulness of maps over compasses if the choice is between the two. |
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cyclones30 |
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santacruz |
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gravelroad |
“ While it is river, you will not easily forget which way is up stream; but when you enter a lake, the river is completely lost, and you scan the distant shores in vain to find where it comes in. A stranger is, for the time at least, lost, and must set about a voyage of discovery first of all to find the river. To follow the windings of the shore when the lake is ten miles, or even more, in length, and of an irregularity which will not soon be mapped, is a wearisome voyage, and will spend his time and his provisions. They tell a story of a gang of experienced woodmen sent to a location on this stream, who were thus lost in the wilderness of lakes. They cut their way through thickets, and carried their baggage and their boats over from lake to lake, sometimes several miles. They carried into Millinocket Lake, which is on another stream, and is ten miles square, and contains a hundred islands. “ They explored its shores thoroughly, and then carried into another, and another, and it was a week of toil and anxiety before they found the Penobscot River again, and then their provisions were exhausted, and they were obliged to return.” |
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Savage Voyageur |
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Scout64 |
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EddyTurn |
hobbydog: "Getting lost is half the fun. " As long as hypothermia is not the other half. |
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4keys |
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SummerSkin |
I've followed that advice religiously on every trip, and it has yet to fail me. In all my trips I've only had one issue locating the portage, and that was due to a map error. (Curse you, Fisher maps!) I have a compass / emergency whistle combo thing that I hang around my neck while paddling. I occasionally use the compass to orient myself or to verify that I'm heading the direction I think I am. |
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PaddleIN |
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Pinetree |
If bushwacking it is a good idea to have a backup of both/ |
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Pinetree |
KBJR-TV updated 12:17 a.m. CT, Thurs., Oct. 9, 2008 A massive search has begun for two Duluth women, aged 23 and 42, who are missing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The Cook County Sheriff's Department is coordinating the search effort. The women left Ely on Friday planning to hike the Kek-a-kay-bic Trail which runs from Ely to the Gunflint. The campers were scheduled to end their trip on Sunday at the South end of the Gunflint trail but haven't been heard from since then Searchers from Cook, Lake and St. Louis County Sheriff's Rescue Squads have been asked to stage in Grand Marais to begin an intensive ground search. In the meantime a plane from the U-S Park Service has been scouting the area in which the women were expected to have been hiking. We have a crew heading toward Grand Marais and we'll bring you more information as it becomes available. |
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TrailZen |
TZ |
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plander |
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Chuckles |
But I find that because canoe country is so uniform, if you lose track of where you are, it can be difficult to re-orient yourself. So I check my map constantly. The taunts are jokes, but can have a hint of barb in them. Occasionally I force them to navigate and then they appreciate my map checking much more. |
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sns |
gravelroad: "Spent a lot of years looking in the woods and mountains for people like that. Including one who walked right across a trail that would have taken him back to the trailhead ..." I'll bet you have a few interesting stories! This guy was not quite to SAR levels yet, but had I not set him straight with a map & then food/water (the next day!) he could well have been a BWCA SAR story. He was the primary topic of my trip report: Angleworm |
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Wispaddler |
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moosedoggie |
It was the thickest I have ever seen. I don't know if visibility was even 50'. Since we had to go, we got out our map and took a bearing from our known location to where we needed to be heading. Then we set the compass on the bow and paddled keeping the bearing. It actually worked. I always travel with both even though now I also carry a GPS. |
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andym |
TrailZen: "Map & compass in the bow, map & compass in the stern. Trust but verify! I'm not sure it is trust but verify for us. It is more like there is no way either of us would ever give up having a map and compass. They're too much fun! |
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MikeinMpls |
What I have found is that a lot of people inexperienced in map reading travel to a spot and then try to figure out where they are on the map, when in fact they should have used the map to travel to a spot so they know where they are. I think that the use of a compass and map is becoming a lost art. When I started tripping in the BWCA there was no GPS. I learned how to read a map and compass from Cliff Jacobson, and later as an Army infantry officer were I learned even more about terrain association, magnetic declination, and the like. Learning in that manner gave me both an affectionate affinity for map and compass, as well as a level of security I just don't feel with a GPS. I certainly could use a GPS, but I would still bring a map and compass for backup. And since a map and compass weigh next to nothing, don't require batteries, and work regardless of the atmospheric conditions, I've just stuck with them. I have an area on the thwart in front of my stern seat where my compass goes, velcroed securely. Usually I have the cover closed and open it only when required. (I am scared to death that the mirror on the opposite side of the cover will reflect the sun into the eyes of a pilot cruising at 37,000 feet and they will call in a rescue.) I always have my map in front of me oriented in the direction of travel. I always always always need to know where I am. I still get turned around once in a great while, the last being on Snowbank where the islands messed me up. Lastly, I feel a map and compass is a nod to earlier times before GPS and camp stoves and Crazy Creek chairs and nylon tents that weigh two pounds. Of course I take full advantage of almost all of the modern conveniences, but I really just enjoy using a map and compass. Thus concludes my philosophical ramblings. Mike |
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hobbydog |
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30Smoke |
I'm sure they would have figured it out, but it is funny that two groups can be going to the same place in two different directions! - They ended up beating us to Dissapointment, but we were heading to Snowbank to get home! I really learned the value of the compass on Insula, as my Cousin showed me how to actually use it to get your bearings with the map. Pretty easy to get turned around on a lake like Insula with all the islands. Kind of fun actually using the compass to navigate. |
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LarryS48 |
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TrailZen |
TZ |