Smoke & Fire Exercise - Forest Skills 1 Course

Using rhododendron to create a heavily smoking fire; which students took a compass sighting on from the hillside, then tracked their compass through the woods to reach the fire.
Part of last weekend's Forest Navigation Skills.

Cardinal Navigation - Using Smoke

Bushcraft Navigation

If you are lost, with no map and no compass, but know you need to head north west (for example) to safety - we call this Cardinal Navigation.

If you know what the wind direction is that day, from a general forecast before you head outdoors, then you can figure your direction.

Here we knew the wind direction was to be east and the smoke acted as a great flag. Turn so the direction the smoke is blowing from is on your right side. Your right side is now east; your left side is now west; and straight ahead is now north.

Trace these simple cardinal directions on the ground with two sticks and from there figure your north west direction to hit safety.

Once you begin walking you should expect to lose sight of the smoke, so use your arm as a directional pointer to move from waypoint to waypoint.

A waypoint is anything that lines up with your direction of travel (and is less then 50 meters away each time); so a stone, a tree, a bush, a grass clump...

This is one of the things we will be covering in two weeks on our Forest & Jungle Navigation Skills 1.

Foraged Lunch

Put this foraged meal together recently.

Brown river trout caught on an emergency hand line, stuffed with wood sorrell and moss roasted on a fire.

Bracken fiddleheads cooked carefully (as toxic otherwise). Salad of dandelion leaves, bramble leaves, nettle leaves and gorse flowers.