This old Department of Defense video goes over navigation the old fashioned way – using maps. In our GPS dependent society many of us have lost this basic, and essential, skill. This deals with military maps, which are pretty widely available and not that different from other government maps.
Here’s a good video on how to use a truck atlas. This will be useful if you plan on bugging out of a city in a vehicle.
REI has a video on using topographical maps that comes from this longer post on using top maps:
Here’s the link to the U.S Geological Survey which allows you to access and download/print up official government maps
This is the Rand McNally road atlas official site. You should have some sort of local road maps for your area.
And I put all this together because I don’t want you to suffer death by GPS.
In remote places like California’s Death Valley, over-reliance on GPS navigation systems can be a matter of life and death.
Each summer in Death Valley, a quarter-million tourists pry themselves from air-conditioned cars and venture into 120-degree heat to snap pictures of glittering salt flats. They come from all over the world, but many have the same traveling companion suction-cupped to their dashboard: a GPS.
But when dozens of abandoned dirt roads lie between you and that destination, things can get tricky. That’s what Donna Cooper, of Pahrump, Nev., discovered last July on a day trip to Death Valley.
After a long day, Cooper and her family asked “Nell,” the GPS, for the shortest route back to their home.
“Please proceed to the highlighted route,” Nell said.
But what came next did not compute. The GPS told them to go 550 feet, then turn right, Cooper says.
“Well, at 550 feet it was like a little path, and then it was like, go a quarter of a mile and turn left. There was nothing there. She had me running in circles for hours and hours and hours,” she says.
Death Valley Ranger Charlie Callagan says Cooper is not the only visitor who’s relied on GPS and been seriously lost. It happens a couple times a year now.
[…]
To explain, he drives out to a lonely corner of the valley. A line pops up in the corner of my GPS screen. Supposedly, it represents a road about to intersect the one we’re driving on. But looking out the window, there is no other road.
“That road there no longer exists. It’s been probably 40 years, but somebody ended up driving on it because it showed up on their GPS,” Callagan says.
In other words, even in the best of times GPS data can be unreliable. If there is damage to roads because of an event, or disruptions in satellite coverage, the GPS can’t be relied on to provide accurate information.
Which means you have to be ready to take charge of your own navigation – just like your ancestors. Get a map.
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Author Rob Taylor
