South Harris Stroll

February 19, 2009 on 4:26 pm | In Hillwalking |

Saturdays when the wind is howling and the tops of the hills are shrouded in mist are not normally the type of day I would be looking forwards to going out hillwalking. But if you are wanting to train people to navigate in difficult conditions on difficult ground the hills of South Harris and a low cloud base are perfect.

Don and I were taking out Duke of Edinburgh Award leaders for some navigation training. Our mission was to look at how micro-navigation and macro-navigation can be used. We wanted to look at how pacing, bearings and timings could be use however more important is where their limitations lay.

Leaving from the parking place on the West end of the ‘coffin road’ just above Luskyntyre we followed the track for a short while before I started picking small features to navigate too. During the navigation there were successes and several failures but how is it the old saying goes ‘you don’t learn from success’.

Lunch was taken under the shelter of a small overhanging cliff and then the weather gave us a good blast and mixed in drizzle to test the waterproofs.

I enjoyed the day and it just reinforced to me the need for the basic navigation skills of map and compass ready for the day the batteries are flat on your GPS and mobile phone and it would be quite nice to get home, safely.

Tim Pickering
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