Day 1 - In the Classroom then round South Cave
Moby (the guy who organised the trip up Catbells), now a newly qualified Mountain Leader, decided to offer us the opportunity to be used as guinea pigs for his Nav course business he was setting up.
We all met up in "the Classroom" to learn the basics of map symbols and scale and also the basic function of a compass.
To be honest, it didn't really make a lot of sense to me but this changed in the afternoon when we went out in "the Field" to practice and some of it did sink in - mainly to do with relating what we were walking past to how it is shown on a map.
Needless to say, I spent the evening stood in my living room, compass in hand, working out where north was then seeing if the Church was where it was supposed to be, according to the map. It was. I was amazed! Something had sunk in!!!
Sadly, I have no pictures of Day 1 as it didn't cross my mind to take my camera 😢
Day 2 - In the Field and a wander up Starbotton Fell
I was up at the crack of dawn to drive to where the minibus was picking us up for the journey up to the Yorkshire Dales where our exam was going to take place.
The exam consisted of each of us having to navigate part of a (pre-determined) route, explaining what we should be looking for/passing on the way and occasionally having to stop and randomly face a direction of Moby's choosing to see if we'd got our heads around compass work!
It all sounds much more complicated than it is and reading how to navigate from a book is much harder than having someone actually show you (you don't really need to know all the terminology, for starters!)
Having said that, we got much more practice with compass work than we should have due to the low cloud and thick fog the higher up the fell we went and it really hit home (for me anyway) that, without this newly discovered map/compass knowledge, we'd have been well and truly lost.
Anyway, I remembered my camera this time, so here's a few pics of the 9 mile walk/exam in the fog!
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| Just for fun.. |
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| Old Cote Moor top across the valley |
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| Cute! |
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| Crossing the footbridge to Starbotton |
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| Heading up the fell and into the murk |
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| The featureless summit of Starbotton Fell |
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| On the way back down - this part was my exam |
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| We all made it in one piece, unscathed! |
Thanks for reading 😊