Having just spent the day practicing navigation skills for my Mountain Leader (mainly searching for large boulders across bogs and crags!) it made me think a bit more about the importance of being able to navigate properly in the hills regardless of the weather conditions.

It’s something that hillwalkers / mountaineers take pretty seriously, but what about mountain bikers? How would you rate your navigation skills – would you be ok if the weather changed to zero visability? Or if the trail didn’t appear on the ground the same as on the map?

Some of the navigation skills for mountaineering are transferable to biking, such as identifying landscape features, but is there a mountain biking equivalent of pacing and timing to calculate distance?

You shouldn’t be on the hill full stop unles you can use map, compass now how to triangulate etc. Not sure if there is a mtb ‘naismiths’ rule though.

I managed to get around the wall at afan.

but is there a mountain biking equivalent of pacing and timing to calculate distance?

Yep it’s called a GPS 😉

Seriously I always take a map with me just in case but I also run ‘My Tracks’ on my phone which shows my position Lat & Long.

Hey Sue, I have been lost plenty of times as a walker in Snowdonia. MTB navigation is a piece of pish compared to walking.

For 1 you are usually following a linear path.
and 2 you have the chance to use a cycle computer to give you an idea of the distance travelled which has got to be so much better than pacing. Most bike leader courses require you to turn up to training with a computer.

James

Generally very good, I’m a bit of a map geek and I have a good sense of direction.

Most embarrassing one recently was a slight miscalculation on High Street in bad weather which lead to an unorthodox but actually quite fun descent. Certainly wasn’t the route that I’d planned though!

Mine are crap, only been riding wyre forest for 6 years and still can’t find my way round 😳

being able to triangulate is a bit OTT, but certainly being able to take a bearing, map read and quickly interpret map to ground is pretty important

Mine are pretty good do alot of walking and riding by map and compass.

I don’t think many mountain bikers think much about it. We offer mtb navigation courses and those who attend are often surprised how bad their nav’ skills are and actually just how easy it is to get ‘displaced from your map’ 😉

I do wonder if the increase in trail centres may have meant a decrease in navigation skills, I don’t think the reliance on satnav in cars has helped much either … there was something on radio 4 that said ‘they’ expect the general populace to lose the ability to read a map (even a basic road map) within the next 2 generations.

^ wot still_sandagetbigusernameaboveme said.

Most mtb’ers have v poor nav skills, and things like sat nav and trail centres mean that there are fewer times that we need to break out any form of navigation skilz these days.

(and a good computer + GPS can help bike nav a LOT)

mine are very good.
30 years of biking/walking have helped.

Have always arrived home after a ride, so I guess my nav skills are OK.

🙂

Always carry a compass and map of where I’m riding though, just in case, but also for exploring new areas/tracks. (usually Exmoor)

Never ever got lost, but i’m never really sure where i am…

Ah, that’s interesting, I didn’t realise there were navigation courses for mtb’ers. What do they cover?

Re the use of computers / GPS etc – I can understand how they are more useful when biking than when on foot (as it’s not that easy to hold a map in front of you when on a bike). But there’s obviously the possibility of technology failure, so carrying map / compass as back-up makes sense (which many of you seem to do). However, unless practised regularly, do you think map based navigation skills could be lost?

Absolute shite. I haven’t used a map in years. GPS will be my next purchase.

Mine are 100%.I can get lost every time I ride.

I carry Satmap, relevant OS:50000 and compass (and I used the compass until about a year ago when the Satmap took over).

In unknown areas I tend to read a little bit ahead (map or satmap) and work by feature – stream, end of forest, low point, crossing/footpath etc etc etc – ie turn R after 3 paths and a stream sort of carry on, so you are sort of mentally following the route, and do a map check every so often to confirm it’s not gone hideously wrong, you usually have a followable path, so you have something that you can ‘assume’ you can follow.

As for distance don’t know of naismiths for MTB but I know my normal flat speed so can approximate at uphill and downhill – but I can’t see it being that close)

I suspect I wouldn’t do a new to me ‘wilderness route’ if I thought the weather would close in, and I also try to plot routes in sort of circle/oval round a middle car park so your bailout is pretty easy (obviously this depends on available tracks)

Not really needed for the kind of riding most folk do, despite some who will claim to venture into the far off wilds. As above, bikes use pre existing trails, so if you get lost, you can always go back.
Maps and compasses? More extraneous stuff to carry in your already voluminous back pack…

Fell runners tend not to carry all that stuff, with much higher chance of being proper lost…

I have done walking group leader course with a number of night nav So can find my way about ok and in the past done a number of trail quests involving less accurate navigation
For me the gps is another tool used along with map and compass not instead of
Trail quests got a bit boring after gps was allowed it removed some of skill for me

“Lost” is a relative term! I’ve been briefly miss-located on a few occasions in the hills but have developed a strong sense of location and direction.

My rule-of-thumb is that the further from the car and the nearer to dangerous terrain you are, the better your location estimate needs to be. You have to pay close attention to your location at all times in places like Cairngorm and The Cuillin for this reason. Having some sort of “escape plan” for which you reserve enough energy to execute is a good idea. Even then I’ve had the odd unexpected “mini epic” [remembers exhaustion from a failed attempt to escape a wicked Easter snow storm on the Gleshiel Ridge]

I don’t really ride my bike anywhere that needs much nav (it’s all pretty, twee hills and woods around here) except following unfamiliar country lanes. Often lanes are very old, sunken and twisty so the vital views you needs to work out where you are are absent. That’s when the map comes out. Most of my nav effort is spent trying to locate all the sneaky trails that aren’t on any map.

I have Kenny Wilson to thank for navigational skills. Anyone who’s followed more than a handful of his routes will surely have experienced not following a path of any sort, and had to resort to triangulation techniques in the general direction intended.

I came to mountain biking from hillwalking so being orientated in the landscape is just what you do.

I carry a map in areas I ain’t familiar with and consult it but the key thing is to remain oriented. Be aware of direction and the lie of the land

my skills are probably above average for mtbers.

some of my mates wouldn’t have the faintest idea about reading contours – or even id a bridleway/ foot path.

What TJ said.

Sue, you might find trailquests a good way to learn and practice the skills. And have fun, of course.

As a marshal, I have rescued people off the KIMM with hypothermia in thick clag, so I’d like to think know a thing or two about navigation. However, when cycling, I would much rather follow the gps around. In unfamiliar remoteish terrain I alway have the OS map in the bag with a compass incase of technology failure though.

When fell running in the lakes, I have just set off in a random direction without a map or gps before though. I did get lost in clag, but I didn’t die.

Re the use of computers / GPS etc – I can understand how they are more useful when biking than when on foot (as it’s not that easy to hold a map in front of you when on a bike). But there’s obviously the possibility of technology failure, so carrying map / compass as back-up makes sense (which many of you seem to do). However, unless practised regularly, do you think map based navigation skills could be lost?

Aye, head down hill…
As TJ says, you can have a great idea of the ‘lay of the land’ – and only refer to map as and when awkward choices / cunfuzzlement occurs.
I have no fear of being lost – ahem – temporarily misplaced – as it is part of the fun of being out there, besides which I ensure all my staff can navigate to ML standard, so likely have better skillz and opportunity to dust them down and practice than most…
I do think that many people would be able to access far more interesting and varied rides if they had the navigation skills and judgement to head out on more interesting rides than a lot of trail centres offer. Like coaching for skills, maybe spending a bit of money on a training course is better than the latest ‘2012 uber new supermakeyoubetterriderinBNG forks’….

Just to add, far from being a chore or boring, today’s navigation training was really good fun. Most of us were already pretty experienced in the mountains, so today was more of a refresher, with more and more difficult challenges being set – cue ‘find small boulder in featureless but quite complex terrain off the side of tryfan’ 🙂

A lot of the skills I’ll keep in mind when mountain biking, especially as most of my riding is over the upland expanse of the carneddi mountains with it’s maze of sheep tracks. Just glad that I’ve got about 20 years experince of trotting round the mountains!

mine are a bit shit tbh but i always ride with someone who knows where they are going, problem solved!!

Local trails, I just take my gps, more to record stats than anything else.
Anywhere I don’t know I take gps, map and compass.
As a past Outdoor Pursuits instructor I know how to use them 🙂
I have never heard of a Naismiths for bikes…. I just estimate, but then I don’t really use Naismiths whilst walking either.

I often come off course on the bike.
The map is in my camelbak, which means stopping, taking it off, unfolding map, finding compass if necessary, etc. it’s a right faff !

Also, you can cover 1km in what, a few minutes ? When walking I wouldn’t normally take a bearing over much longer than that so you’d have to be stopping all the time !
On the other hand, 20 minutes off course is a long way off course on a bike !

I have to say that I find a visible GPS a lot more useful while cycling than I do when walking, mostly because of the speed differential. Shoot past a turn-off when zipping down a hill and you can travel some distance before realising it, meaning you might have a big climb just to get back on to your route.

I do occasionally practice my micro-navigation skills – just in case the technology fails.

As for an equivalent of Naismiths Rule for bikes – I can’t imagine there’s anything too useful. I’ve managed to develop my own formula for longer trips based on a few years worth of data, but even then it needs tweaked according to terrain etc. and it’s pretty much useless for shorter distances.

I did a day’s training with a guy I know from Langdale mountain rescue testing out his navigational skills training on me before setting it up as a business. He seemed to think I was reasonably good. 🙂

http://www.mountainsplus.co.uk/

Grew up around lots of hill-walking and map reading though – it’s generally me that navigates if I go out in the Lakes with other people, and we very rarely get lost (I’ve got lost-ish on my own a few times though). Do agree that GPS is very handy for biking though – even just knowing a rough altitude can be v useful.

A lot better/worse now that I’ve got my old Touch Pro II with massive battery and memory map working nicely :). Five and a half hours and only down to half battery used, with GPS and screen on all the time!

I do have some ‘skills’, but out of practice in actually using them, so end up floundering around an OS map or print out a bit more than I should when not using the GPS. (To be fair, same before I got the GPS system sorted – I like it more because it means that I can just keep riding without having to stop and work out which turning I’m supposed to be taking every few hundred meters.)

I’m a bit of a map geek, in that, before I travel a route it’s pretty much memorised before I set off. I usually only use paper maps when out and I study them alot beforehand, and I generally study satelite imagery too, so I’ve usually got a fair idea what to expect when out, I pretty much visualise a route in my head. Though i’ve got a new phone these days, so GPS is a bit of a novelty for me recently.

At the end up though, on a bike, you need to be really lost before you’re fecked. As it’s quite easy just to track back the way you came. Which is something that is more difficult as say a walker.. For example walk 15 miles, get lost, it’s a bit harder to track back than cycling 30 miles and getting lost.

On naismiths for bikes – there is this tool someone off here developed. Useful for estimating how long a route will take but I wouldn’t trust it to work out how far I had gone.
http://www.mtb-routes.co.uk/northyorkmoors/routes/Esk-Valley-Railway/timeanddistance.aspx

Never seen the point in a gps myself. Been out with a few folk with them and they blindly followed the gps the wrong way because the path on the ground was not quite where it was on the map. Nice toy, wouldn’t rely on one

In theory I know the skills, but I can’t remember the last time I had to take a bearing and the last couple of times I’ve used a compass it’s simply been to get an accurate north fix.(maybe twice in the last couple of years). The last time I got seriously lost was up on High Street in thick fog – missed a LH turning that went back at about 45° behind me on a rocky DH run. I realised about 10 minutes later and found it again, maybe 10 mins after that. As others have said – backtracking is pretty efficeient on the bike (if you have to)

Part of it is a lot of riding in areas I have reasonable knowledge of. I might not know exactly where I am, but I know where I’ve come from and I want to end up and its “thataway”. The other thing, especially in poor weather is not to get lost in the first place – taking it a bit slower and *not* missing the turning is better than getting lost at great speed and then having to backtrack.

Also – mtber spend a lot of time in the woods – maps are far less useful here when you have next to no visibility anyway.

But yes, my wilderness skills could do with some work.

pretty ok at navigating in mountains in white out / dark – been doing it for years, though i did find some time spent orienteering improved my skills a lot – nowadays find a gps speeds things up as don’t have to “head off” or spend time picking up features just to cross check location – can’t remember ever being off route even

been lost on bike quite a bit mainly because not bothering to look at map too often plus in forest areas the mapping often doesn’t compare too well with what you actually find on the ground (tracks/paths rather than contours and features)and as you blast along you just hope its all going to sort out in end

My map reading/navigation etc is pretty spot on (if I may say so myself!).

Done a lot of walking and sailing so used to plotting positions on a map although I rarely get a compas out in good visibility on dry land as it’s fairly pointless.

The problem with MTB’ing is the speed and lack of desire to stop. Who want’s to stop every 30 seconds on a decent to take a bearing and check they’re still on the correct path? Whereas a walker that would be every 5 minutes for the same distance.

“but is there a mountain biking equivalent of pacing and timing to calculate distance?”
Yep it’s called a GPS bike computer

FTFY <wanders off grumbling about all this new-fangled technology>