Libyan Sahara

Just back after a fantastic and physically intense fortnight in the Libyan desert. This photo of me scaling a dune was taken after nine hours trekking. Every little helps at this stage of the day and so you'll notice that I'm walking on the firmer windward side of the ridge.

It was a great test of skills and opportunity to research. I learned plenty during my time with the Tuareg and, outrageous to claim so I whisper it quietly, I may even have taught them one or two things. I return with over 1000 photos, a packed notebook, some video, some sound recordings and tired legs after averaging over 15 miles a day on foot. A real natural navigation treasure trove, that I will be sharing over the coming months, but now it is time to face the email inbox etc.

The Generous Trees

The more I study natural navigation, the more indebted I feel to trees. There are few environmental conditions that they do not make some effect to reflect. Sun, rain, shade, heat, cold, dryness, dampness, soil type... and in this case snow and wind.

Early on Monday morning these young beech trees pointed very dependably to NNE with their white lines. I was able to leave the path with confidence.

Sun Patterns and Natural Randomness

Time for a bit of ramble.

At the heart of natural navigation there is potential for conflict.

If the sun did not behave with rational, dependable predictability then reading its effects might be a forlorn cause. We can say with great confidence where it will be in the sky at almost any moment in the future. And yet, nearly everything that follows the sun closely, from plants and animals to the weather itself, does not seem to have much fondness for rigid patterns or predictability.

This photo is an example. I could have worked out exactly the spot that the sun would rise and what it would do during the day years ago if I chose to, it would be a poor bookie who took bets on that sort of thing, but the weather... that is very different. The odds of me being surrounded by deep snow right now, particularly this close to the south coast, must be quite small. The seasonal fluctuations can be further complicated by the fact that we are now getting a lot more solar heat than we were a month ago: we are more than six weeks from the coldest time of the year in pure solar terms.

If we are looking at things that are removed from the skies, but are still strongly influenced by them then we are left with no choice but to look past the randomness, to look for clues in trends. Herein lies the conflict: we observe randomness and regularity in tandem. To resolve this and to have confidence in reading nature we must accept that there is randomness that lies with trends, which in turn rest on predictable patterns.

Accepting randomness, not being fooled by it as we search for sometimes hidden trends, that is where the science goes a bit quiet and the art lies.

Rosy Fingers or Urban Glow

Everyone who starts their day outdoors welcomes dawn, but for natural navigators it is an important time that should be both enjoyed and absorbed. Sunrise is one of the best times to check our bearings, metaphorically and literally.

Something we need to look out for on land, and to a lesser extent at sea, is the light from towns. Light pollution is a perennial fiend for stargazers, but it can also throw us if we are searching for early signs of dawn, and its effects can be especially strong if there is low cloud.

The urban glow is unlikely to throw us a curveball if we have been studying the sky for a while, but it can be a problem if we emerge from darkness and take a first glimpse. The two photos above, which I took this morning, are only separated by twelve minutes and illustrate this quite well. If we are able to watch the transition from the first to the second, it is unlikely that we will mistake the rosy hue on the right of the second picture for a true sunrise, but imagine we are rubbing our eyes and our first sight of the horizon is the second picture. The temptation would be to see that colour as the sun announcing its imminent arrival. We would be mistaken: it is the light pollution from Littlehampton, a slightly less glorious ball of orange.

The Lure of Kingley Vale

Yesterday afternoon I was driving back home from Chichester when the car took over and lead me to the West Stoke car park. This wild places book has had a bewitching effect. Was it a case of many a true word spoken in jest in my entry yesterday? I really did not expect to find myself at Kingley Vale, one of the nominated 'wild places', as soon as a few hours after writing it.

Walking for a couple of hours from sunlight to dusk and beyond, there were plenty of rich natural navigation clues and I studied them briefly and took pictures that will appear in this blog over time, but yesterday was not really about navigating. Sometimes when studying anything with nature at its heart it feels important to leave the cerebral, academic hat at home and just wonder. My frost-rich walk yesterday was one of those times. The path led into the forest of ancient yew trees, many over 500 years old and some dating back 2000 years. There is a cliche that I will try to resist and fail, about saplings growing here as a famous young man went about his day in the Middle East.

The Vale filled with shrieks and yelps and the path emerged above a frozen pond that some young boys were attacking with heavy branches and logs. Climbing steeply the hills rolled down into a light mist that nearly obscured the shining spring tide of the harbour. The track curved back back on itself as it traced the high spine of the hills and the light pinks to the southwest reluctantly yielded to cold dark blues. A plaque on a boulder commemorated the naturalist Sir Arthur George Tansley and Venus shone brightly through the twigs of some bare branches.

It was dark as I passed through another dense tunnel of yew branches and when I emerged at a haunting wooden sculpture, pagan in appearance, the horizon had become crowded with Venus and the two-day-old sickle moon chasing Jupiter and a faint Mercury down to the horizon.

The yellow Capella was the first of the stars to announce itself and by the time I was back at the car it had been joined by hundreds of its friends.

There is a lyric in a song by Elbow:

'One day like this a year'd see me right.'

The Near New Moon and Sunrise

Dawn is a critical and exciting time for the natural navigator, it sets up the day. It is also a time of rapid change, I took the second of these two photographs only one hour after the first yesterday morning, but that need not catch us off guard.

With experience it is possible to tell that this moon is two days off a new moon, which means that it will rise two of my fist-widths (24 degrees) ahead of the sun. The sun travels through the sky at just over a full fist width (15 degrees) an hour. It was therefore possible for me to gauge that the sun would rise in about one and half hours just by looking at the low moon in a dark sky.

GPS (Global Piglet System)

The worlds of technology, navigation and nature convened in a mildly surreal way over the past month.

Satellite navigation development, like all things space-related, often appears to be governed more by national pride than calm pragmatism. Nobody has yet explained effectively to me the need for billions to be invested in Galileo, the European alternative to the American GPS system. The Russian version of GPS, GLONASS, has not been a story of relentless success or necessity either, but apparently the system has now been tested on Vladimir Putin's dog.

'Mr Ivanov said that the equipment goes on a standby mode when "the dog doesn't move, if it, say, lies down in a puddle."

Mr Putin interrupted him jokingly: "My dog isn't a piglet, it doesn't lie in puddles.'

Cats and Hats

Those who have been on a course will know the strange pleasure that I get from connecting seemingly unrelated things through natural navigation, so here, before your eyes I will attempt to connect a cat on a dustbin and a Greek orthodox priest.

The Gooleys have just returned from a week visiting family in the Peloponnese. My brother's house is high in the Greek hills and we found ourselves following the same route down a few times each day on the way to towns, villages or the beach. It was during these trips in the car that I noticed that certain animals and indeed, in the case of one Greek orthodox priest, people appeared with a soothing predictability at certain points on the journey.

There was a corner that I remembered well for the dustbin which invariably had this cat sitting on it, and the turning to the beach was nearly always to be found a few hundred yards after we saw a priest walking by the road. There is no denying that this is an odd way to view a journey to us in the West, but to the traditional Pacific navigators it would have been comforting and familiar. They included among their many methods of finding their way to the next island, the art of 'pookof', noting which sea creatures appeared with dependable regularity in which locations as they approached land. A school of dolphins a few hours south of one island, a couple of turtles a day east of another.

My long-suffering family even had to endure me saying things like, 'Shall we head towards the priest and then turn towards the pookof cat and go for a swim in the sea?' They must be delighted to be home.

Two Beaches for the Price of One

There is something surreal, perhaps postmodern?, about blogging about a newspaper that is writing about you. Ian Belcher reviewed my course in the Sunday Times Travel section today, you can read it here, but then you might be reading this because you've already read his piece... such are the conundrums of modern life...

Back to reality. I am sometimes struck by how different it can feel walking in different directions along the same beach. Often this is because the wind goes from being on your back to being on your face, but there can be more solid reasons. At Climping where I was this morning the shingle is moved gradually and relentlessly eastwards by the waves. This forces it up against the groynes and means that if you walk east you are faced by gentle hills and sharp drops down, but when you turn around you walk down gentle down slopes and are faced with steep rises. In the legs it feels like a different beach altogether.

Latitude Lice

Last night I spent a few minutes re-reading a couple of passages from Barry Cunliffe's book about Pytheas the Greek. About 2300 years ago Pytheas went seriously far north for a Mediterranean, but the debate still rages about how far he went. Some of it seems to revolve around an expression about there being enough light to 'pick the lice from your shirt' at midnight. Now that's what I call natural.

Smoke and Sun

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a 'typical English country scene'. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which is sort of what we have come to expect from the southern central English coast.

The sheep don't seem to have aligned themselves in any useful way, which considering the effort that the rest of the scene is going to is not very cooperative of them. They could learn a lot from their fellow grazers, the cows that have been posing for Google recently.

A Breeze

On some days it is easier than others to tell which way the wind blows.

Today we enjoyed a nice 30kts/Force 7/35mph/56kph, depending how you like your porridge.

Slightly Fickle Moss

Having spent the morning organising images for upcoming courses, I was reminded of a regular problem with learning anything practical from nature. There is a real tendency to bias. By which I mean when we are learning something new there is a great temptation to either make our observations fit our predictions, or to overlook things until we find something that looks the way we want it to.

Moss on trees and buildings is a great example of this. The popular notion is that moss will grow on the north side. This is sometimes true, but often not and for a good reason. The harsh truth is that moss doesn't care where north is at all. Moss will grow where moisture is retained and this is determined by rain, sun, wind and other factors. If it was only about the sun then it would be a far better indicator of north.

To avoid putting too much of a dampener, forgive me, on the spirits of those who like to cling to the north moss theory, here is a nice picture taken near my home looking east at a tree trunk. Lots of moss on the north side, next to none on the south.