How good are your backcountry navigation skills? Take the Wilderness Navigation Challenge and find out.

The Challenge is a series of questions and answers/explanations that cover beginner to intermediate wilderness navigation skills, such as:

• The 3 kinds of map scale

• Using a map grid, a twig and your finger to measure distance

• Contour reading (spurs, gullies, summits, knolls, plateaus . . .)

• Off trail route selection

• Using an altimeter to find your point position

• Contours - contour lines, index contours and contour interval

• UTM coordinates - why you should know about them, how to plot and measure

• How to use coordinates from a GPS to plot your position on a map and get "unlost"

• How to print free topo maps with well marked trails and shaded relief

• Magnetic declination (what it is, when you do and do not need to care about it)

• How to easily find the correct declination for any point on earth

• The Four Core compass skills: measuring a bearing, following a bearing, plotting a compass bearing onto a map, and measuring a bearing from a map

• Aiming off - what is is and when to use it

• Why resection (aka triangulation) often does not work

• 7+ helpful navigation tools for your smartphone

• Terrain visualization practice (look at a section of topo map, get a picture in your head what the terrain looks like, then look at a Google Earth image of the actual landscape)

If you can answer most of the questions correctly, congrats, your navigation skills are pretty solid!

If you get stuck on a question, most answer slides have a link to an instructional video that covers that particular question in more detail.
You can see the videos on this website under Get Better > Navigation Videos, or search YouTube for "Columbia River Orienteering Club."

The navigation challenge is a PDF file that is hosted on a shared Google Drive.