The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Happy New Year!

I do not share everything in this blog, you will be pleased to know. Most matters familial and ablutionary are kept from these pages.

So too are exact locations from time to time. It is not usually necessary to pinpoint the precise spot where a natural navigation technique revealed itself, or to give a 16 figure grid reference of the perch from which a photograph was taken.

Sometimes, I must confess that I deliberately fail, as unostentatiously as possible, to reveal even a general location if I am keen not to encourage visitors for any reason. This is rare, but it does happen. I have walked on certain routes in the Lake District and felt guilty for having let my boots join the millions of others that etch too deeply into these rocks at times. The guilt would worsen if I then added in any way to…

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There is a good piece in yesterday’s Telegraph travel section, by Kate Humble, encouraging those who visit Oman to step out of the resort and into the mountains.

The lines that caught my attention were. predictably, when she asked her savvy guides about their navigation skills.

“How do you know you’re heading anywhere?” I asked.

“You get to know clues. The path down a wadi is never straight down; it usually follows a contour to the head of the valley and around. Omanis don’t like going up or down if they can avoid it. Donkey poo is also a pretty good sign you’re on a path.”

Contained in this there is a pretty good general rule. If it is a tough choice between heading down or holding a contour, go for the latter. Either could be a wrong choice, but holding your height will normally leave you with…

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My thanks to all the GQ readers who came to my natural navigation talk at Molton House in the West End last night. Thanks also to Monkey Shoulder whisky for hosting the night.

I am fortunate, my work takes me to all sorts of places: deserts, mountains, universities, bookshops, islands, offices, clubs, societies… but never before had I been invited to a venue that describes itself as, ‘a sybaritic haven’.

If talking about the natural world in such a quintessentially urban venue was to some extent a clash of cultures, then it did not seem to phase readers of GQ, who beat the tube strike to pack the place out. There were lots of good questions at the end of the talk. Notably a series of ones enquiring about the difference in abilities between men and women. It wasn’t an all-male audience by a long way and,…

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Nearly all navigation is an attempt to join landmarks together. Even those on boats crossing oceans are probably hoping to find a landmark they recognise as the final part of their journey.

The word, ‘landmark’, simply means something that makes a location recognisable. It is deliberately vague as it can apply to anything, a landmark may be extraordinary – the statue of Christ the Redeemer towering over Rio de Janeiro’s from Corcovado mountain. Or it may be mundane – a red postbox at the edge of a village.

The more confident you can be that you have both successfully identified a landmark and that you know exactly where that landmark is, the more confident you can be that you know where you are.

A landmark does not need to be grand, it does not even need to be recognised by others, just so long as it is recognised by you.…

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For the love of God, spare us from any more blog titles like that, you are thinking. But persevere, there is a point to it. Somewhere.

I have just spent a fun 24 hours near Abergavenny, on Sugar Loaf Mountain (to give the big hill it’s superior title). I was joining some of the BBC Wales team.

The day reminded me just how easy it is to avoid the crowds. If work and other more important things allow, then the start and end of the day are the times to be on mountains, up to a certain altitude anyway. I can remember cuddling a friend in the lee of an igneous rock outcrop a few hundred feet below the summit of Mt Rinjani in Lombok, Indonesia. Not a twin bedroom, I hasten to add. We shivered violently in wet clothes praying that the dawn’s sun would get…

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When talking about heat and wind in the context of chillies, there is a risk that we might start to think some very un-navigational thoughts…

… however, this is a risky business, so here are two jalapeno chillies. One lived its life in a south-facing greenhouse, the other lived near it, outside near a south-facing wall. They both received identical amounts of sunlight. They both grew in the same soil and received plenty of water. The only serious differences to their environments were the temperature and wind exposure.

It is not too hard to see that nature is quite fussy about its environment and it is this fussiness that can give us a helping hand. It is sometimes possible to deduce useful things about the elements from two examples of the same species. One big example of this can sometimes be found in the different look and feel of two…

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