… or a clue to direction. One of the challenges in natural navigation that never goes away is the need to constantly change our focus. Our eyes have a tendency to drift towards a middle-distance focus. This can mean that clues in the background and the foreground can be easily overlooked. The first photo of a field on the lower slopes of a volcano in La Palma is a good example of this. There is a temptation to look to the trees for help, and they do offer some, but better help can be found much closer as the second picture shows. The southern side of these flowers is opening up before any other side. When seen close up like this it is hard to miss, but we all walk past clues like this everyday and our eyes are so often drawn elsewhere. 
The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally
A Scruffy Patch of Land…
26 February 2010 by Tristan Gooley
Wayward Wayfinding with the Moon
10 April 2009 by Tristan Gooley
I’ve been experimenting over the past few nights, as we approached the full moon, with a technique that I’ve been working on that combines two others. It is possible to find direction using the moon in a number of ways: by its shadow, by using a tangent to its crescent and by understanding its phase relationship with the sun. 
A very indirect method, that I have not come across anywhere else before, is to use moonlight reflected off cloud edges to reveal the direction of the moon, then to use an understanding of its phase to determine direction. Like a lot of methods for finding your way using the moon, it sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, but it does still come with some inbuilt errors. I will try to persevere and experiment with this method some…
Welcome to the home of natural navigation on the Internet.
Natural navigation is the art of being able to find your way solely by using nature. It encompasses using the sun, moon, stars, weather, water, land, sea, plants and animals.
The Natural Navigator is the school set up by Tristan Gooley to research and teach natural navigation. It is also the title of his book on the subject.
If you would like to know more about natural navigation you can browse the website, read about Tristan’s natural navigation book, or listen to a BBC Radio 4 interview with Tristan.
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