lost – The Map Room

Four Articles on Navigating Outdoors

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 22:57:14 +0000

Outside’s Andrew Skurka has posted a four-part series on the skills and tools required to navigate outdoors (remember outdoors?), which in general means knowing how not to get lost. In part one, “A Backpacker’s Guide to Maps,” Skurka recommends what kind of maps to take with you: paper maps, mainly, of various scales, but with digital maps as a backup. Part two, “The Gear You Need to Navigate in the Backcountry,” looks at equipment: not just GPS, but also basics like a compass, altimeter and a watch. In part three, “How to Master Navigational Storytelling,” is about developing a narrative of the route you’re taking to avoid getting lost. Finally, Skurka offers a checklist of skills to test yourself against.

Previously: The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

Jonathan Crowe — Wed, 17 Oct 2018 19:45:13 +0000

It’s become a commonplace that modern technology has eroded our ability to navigate: that relying on GPS and smartphones is destroying our brains’ abilities to form cognitive maps and that we’d be utterly lost without them.¹ I’m not sure I subscribe to that point of view: plenty of people have been getting themselves lost for generations; relying on an iPhone to get home is not much different from nervously having to follow someone’s scribbled directions without really knowing where you’re going.

For my part, I can’t get lost. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to get lost: that has, in fact, been known to happen. I mean that I can’t allow myself not to know where I am under any circumstances. I’ve got a pretty good cognitive map, but if I’m in a strange city without a map of said city, I’m deeply uncomfortable if not upset; provide me with a map to get my bearings with and I’m immediately at ease. In my case, having an iPhone—with multiple map applications—means I don’t have to get to the nearest map outlet as soon as freaking possible. It’s not, in other words, an either-or situation.

John Edward Huth is firmly in the former camp. He’s a particle physicist at Harvard who’s worked on the Higgs boson who for years has been running an interesting side gig: he teaches a course on what he has called “primitive navigation”—the ancient means of navigating the world that existed prior to the advent of some later technology. The course, and the accompanying book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013), are an exercise in recapturing those methods.

Said methods include some you’d expect: celestial navigation, dead reckoning, the use of a compass; but also some that are much more subtle, that rely on observation and situational awareness—on mindfulness. Understanding how winds, waves and currents work in a given location, or the migration patterns of animals, enables you to use them as natural compasses, or to make corrections in your course—that is, if you pay close attention to them. These are ancient tricks of the trade, not all of which are reliable (moss on the north side of trees) or whose reliability needs to be qualified.

What Huth posits, then, is the need to be connected to and aware of your surroundings—the antithesis, some might say, of staring at a smartphone screen all day. But that connectedness is also stubbornly local: I might know the patterns of winds and birds where I live, but put me on another continent and I’ll flounder. Not everything in this book scales.

The book is a resolutely practical guide, with hundreds of figures, but its most valuable lesson, I suspect, is to demonstrate just how good human beings can become, unaided, at navigating their surroundings—at getting unlost—with practice and skill. It’s something we haven’t needed to do for a while. It’s useful to be able to do it, even if it doesn’t come up very much.

More on Huth and his work from The New Yorker and Harvard Magazine. Also see this YouTube video:

Amazon

Getting Lost with a Cellphone

Jonathan Crowe — Tue, 10 Oct 2017 17:00:12 +0000

Writing for the Washington Post, Jenny Rough looks at how people get themselves lost hiking, despite having a cellphone or a GPS for directions, and how to get reoriented when lost in the wilderness: by remaining calm, by getting yourself situated, and yes, by learning how to use a map. [Geo Lounge]

How Not to Get Lost

Jonathan Crowe — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 22:23:42 +0000

I am not one of those people who is always getting themselves lost. In fact the idea of lost is a more or less academic concept to me: I have a rock-solid sense of direction. I suspect that the same is true for most of the map aficionados who read this website. But maybe you are someone who gets lost very easily, or you at least know someone who is. For such people, the New York Times’s Christopher Mele has a set of practical tips to improve your sense of direction, most of which are predicated on grounding yourself, observing your surroundings and relying not so much on the technology. [MAPS-L]

‘Could Society’s Embrace of GPS Be Eroding Our Cognitive Maps?’

Jonathan Crowe — Sun, 21 Feb 2016 20:19:04 +0000

Earlier this month in the New York Times, Greg Milner looked at something that was a frequent subject during The Map Room’s first life: people getting themselves lost by blindly following their GPS units (or satnavs, as the British call them).

Could society’s embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps? For Julia Frankenstein, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg’s Center for Cognitive Science, the danger of GPS is that “we are not forced to remember or process the information—as it is permanently ‘at hand,’ we need not think or decide for ourselves.” She has written that we “see the way from A to Z, but we don’t see the landmarks along the way.” In this sense, “developing a cognitive map from this reduced information is a bit like trying to get an entire musical piece from a few notes.” GPS abets a strip-map level of orientation with the world.

[via]

Milner is the author of the forthcoming book Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds (W. W. Norton, May 2016): pre-order at Amazon or iBooks.

For another look at how GPS may be affecting our brains’ ability to navigate, see “Global Impositioning Systems,” a long read by Alex Hutchinson in the November 2009 issue of The Walrus, which I told you about in 2011.