Mountain Navigation Weekend Course,
West Coast of Scotland
Learn to Navigate in the High Mountains - West Coast of Scotland
This course is designed to teach you how to navigate with map and compass in mountainous terrain. It should increase your confidence if you have only basic navigational knowledge or have mountain walking experience but little formal navigation training.
The course is centred around the mountains near Fort William on the West Coast of Scotland.
This course is very much hands-on with a great deal of practice in a real mountain environment. We will camp out in the mountains to enable a night navigation session.
By the end of the course you should be able to confidently relate landscape features to the map and vice versa and be able to navigate in poor visibility.
Please also allow for route flexibility, to take into account different abilities within a group, and the possible need to modify plans.
Learning Outcomes
Here are some of the key skills you will be learning:
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Basic use of map and compass
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Use of bearings
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Relocation (if unsure of your location)
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Grid references
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Navigation using contour features (micro and macro)
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Route finding strategies (e.g. attack points, aiming off, dead reckoning, dog legs, hand rails, re-section)
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Navigation in poor visibility and featureless terrain (including night navigation)
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Distance estimation using pacing and timings
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Route Planning
More Details
Price: £240 per person
Location: Moidart, 35 miles west of Fort William. Lifts can be arranged from the nearest railway station, Lochailort.
Duration: 2 days: starts 09.00 Saturday and ends around 16:00 on Sunday.
Group size: usually 2 - 6 people - we keep groups small to minimise our impact on this pristine environment.
Facilities: Drinking water, purified from the hill streams - self catering
What to bring: Course-specific kit list
