/backcountrynavigation

Dick Blust, Jr.'s Back Country Navigation for the Hunter

Back Country Navigation for the Hunter

This series of essays written by Duck Blust, Jr. was originally published on Kifaru's website in mid-2004. They detail a navigation system utilizing map, compass and GPS, with a focus on the UTM coordinate system. Although written for the back country hunter, the system outlined is applicable to any wilderness traveller.

It is the best instruction I have encountered for back country navigation, and is something that I have referenced frequently since its publication. In 2011 I was able to attend a class with the author, which was organized by members of the Kifaru Forums.

Years ago I had printed out a hard-copy that I kept in a binder. Wanting to replace that with an e-reader friendly version, I have formatted the text as Markdown, suitable for processing via Pandoc. I have cleaned the essays slightly, fixing some typos, making the formatting more consistent, and inserting a small number of footnotes to point to useful resources which have appeared since the initial writing.

$ pandoc -S -o backcountrynavigation.epub title.txt chapters/*