Bag main compartment:

• Waterproofs
• Headlamp
• Food
• Spare map

Front compartment:

• First aid kit
• Camera
• GPS (for plotting route on the computer later)
• Spare batteries
• Wallet
• Keys
• Space blanket

Fleece pockets:

• Woolly hat
• Gloves
• Compass
• Folded up map, printed from an OS map

In the rear of the bag is a big pocket for my water bladder, 2 litres so that I’ve got plenty spare. I just need to charge my phone now and that’s me pretty much ready.

Up comes Wednesday evening. Parking a short distance from the start point, 14 of us gathered at the start point and began the crucial first step in our two groups: making sure everyone knows where they are on the map. MP3 players removed and torches switched on, we head off on our journey into the night.

The stars

Any clear night with the Scouts, I’m keen to point out at least one thing – finding North. By the end of the night, I had a Scout that found it easier and quicker to find North with the stars than the others could get out their compasses and wait for the needle to settle down.

To try keep them observant, I challenged them to spot a satellite drifting across the sky while we walked. After dozens of planes and a couple of shooting stars, I pointed out a satellite that was travelling through Cassiopeia. I’m always amazed seeing this kind of thing – knowing that people have put these satellites in space and how big an achievement it is to do that.

Navigation Technique

The first technique I mentioned to the Scouts was handrailing. The path wasn’t always visible, but it quite clearly followed a parallel fence. By following the fence, you knew you were following the path too. Handrailing is following any feature you can see, such as mountain ridges, rivers and roads. As long as you know where that feature is on your map, you know what line you’re on.

Helpfully, the ending of that same fence marked the point where we would be turning North. This point was marked on a route card and gives you a tick off point which you can use to know exactly where you are. Heading North though, I made sure the Scouts were aware of the fences on the map that they could tick off, increasing their awareness of that leg of the hike.

A little later on the journey, pacing was introduced so they could judge how far 100 metres was in real life. I went with 150 paces for the little ones, down to about 130 for the taller Scouts. This was accurate enough to finish us all at around the same spot so we could try the next bit.

Acting as we had very low visibility such as fog or heavy rain, we headed directly East, leapfrogging to be as precise as possible. In essence, part of your group goes ahead following a bearing as best as they can, then the 2nd part of your group tells those ahead if they are travelling off-course. Then the people ahead stop and you meet up with them before repeating the exercise until you reach your destination – which in our case was a path travelling perpendicular to us.

On the next leg, I introduced them to timings. Based on the knowledge of their current pace of a little over 4km/h and that we were about to walk 1.1km, we estimated that we’d reach our next destination in 15 minutes. At this stage, I left out any fidgeting you would do with the timing when you know you’re travelling up or downhill, our route was so short and flat that it would not effect us and would be difficult to demonstrate.

GPS

Now that my Scouts could use a map, a compass, pacing and timing to navigate, I finally let them have a go at playing with the GPS units I had with me (a Garmin eTrex and eTrex Summit). I’m a big fan of GPS, but I think it’s important to stress to the Scouts that it’s still a bad idea to rely on technology like that.

Since the route was already programmed into each device, they were mainly looking at the various information available to them. Here’s just a few things they appreciated:

• Their current walking speed – which they loved testing
• How far to the next point on the route, and how long it would take to get there
• The built in compass in the eTrex Summit, and how the eTrex figured out your direction without it
• The altimeter in the Summit, measuring the slight change in pressure as we walked uphill

And relax

Soon we reached the end of our journey and waited a couple of minutes for the second group to finish too. A lot of the Scouts showed their interest in the upcoming Incident Night Hike which Maidenhead district runs each year. It’s up high on my favourite events on Scouting, setting off at 10pm on a Friday night and travelling around 10km, with stops along the way to undertake various incident bases.

I think this year our Scouts will be armed to their teeth with knowledge on navigation. Hopefully they’ll be good on the tasks they have to achieve along the way – before it gets to 4am and they’re too shattered to walk, let alone think.