Wilderness Wayfinding: How to Survive in the Wilderness as You Travel [Paperback]

Bob Newman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994

The first truly complete easy-to-follow guide to finding your way in the forest, mountains, desert or any wild environment. Let a pro teach you about maps and compasses, land navigation, building emergency shelter, finding food and water, forecasting weather, administering first aid and much more.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Paladin Press (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0873647602
• ISBN-13: 978-0873647601
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,304,566 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Better off buying the boyscout handbook, May 26, 2006

By 

J. Hedrick (San Francisco,CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wilderness Wayfinding: How to Survive in the Wilderness as You Travel (Paperback)

Seriously you are better off buying the boyscout handbook. If I was on Survivor Island I would want the boyscout handbook with me. I grew up in Alaska and am a former Marine and as such I have a very hard time believing the author was a Marine. The first two chapters of the book are spent explaining USGS map legends in a very limited way. Save your money on those first two chapters with the free pamphlet the USGS will send you when you buy one of their maps. The third and fourth chapters deal with compass work but in no better detail than the standard boyscout handbook or any of the easy to get military manuals on navigation. So far in the first four chapters most of the them have been spent with the author either trying to convince you he knows what he's talking about or that he is funny so you can skip the first three paragraphs of any chapter. He does actually spend twenty pages very briefly outlining methods of finding the cardinal points without a compass but doesn't explain why they work or how to get anything more than basic north south(Kemosabe the sun comes up we go other way we find California). And his chapters on finding water are just down right deadly. He tells some mythical tale about how it rains all the time in the Mojave and digging on the far side of bends in dry stream beds about three feet down will keep you alive. There are illustrations vaugely instructing you on how to get water from plastic stills, but doesn't explain how to get water into them. If you do manage to have a sheet of plastic dig a shallow pit the plastic can cover an hour or so before sunset and fill it with vegitation and your own urine and place a can or cup in the center then cover with the plastic and place a rock over the cup. In the morning you have collected water but you won't ever learn that from this book. And the truly laughable thing about the chapter comes next where he advocates following wild mustangs and deer to watering holes. And in the next chapter he advocates hunting deer for food or rabbits which is just fine assuming you brought a gun.

This book does advocate two good things indirectly, which is to say they assume. First that before you go into the wilderness you have either studied the terrain or bought a map of the local area. Which is to say that if you plan to leave your car in Yosemite or the Mojave desert you understand that if you keep going west long enough you will hit a highway. Or if you go to Montana and you make a right off I-90 that if you go south long enough you get back to the interstate. Having a very basic idea of where you are and were you came from can save your life. Two Oakland police officers got lost and nearly died on a mountain that is in the middle of Oakland that is three miles across. If they had kept heading west they would have found a road.

The second thing this book advocates by assumption is that every once in a while it is okay to violate rule number one of wilderness survival. And rule number one is stay put and wait for help to come to you. But sometimes that can get you killed, waiting for three days in the desert or deep snow can kill you. So if you can deduce where a road or town is within a two days walk you may want to make the walk. Especially if you or your party are wounded. Speeking of wounded the section on first aid in this book is horrible, again the boyscout handbook or any of the cheap millitary manuals are better.

While the information in this book is just a cheap rehash of commen sense navigation books the ideas of making sure you know at least the general layout of the surrounding areas(I-5 is west, highway 275 is north, and the Yosemite range of mountains is to the east) and bringing a map if not a map and compass. And realizing that in certain situations you need to find help rather than waiting are good ideas to add to your survival repitoir. But I paid less that four bucks for this book and feel upset about it. But if you have only every used a GPS and don't know how to find north without it you should really get a basic book like this for when your batteries die.