Apparently it's good to slow down
And other things I've learnt from a week of micro navigation in the mountains
If you’re looking for me this week, you’ll most likely find me standing on a fell in the mist, studying a map and looking confused. My frown line is significantly deeper than it was a month ago and I can’t remember the last time my feet were dry - but I think that something is finally starting to click.
In case you missed it (which is perhaps unlikely because I feel like it’s all I’ve talked about recently), I have my assessment to become a Mountain Leader coming up soon. It’s five days long and includes a three day expedition with two nights of wild camping, after which you’re deemed capable of safely guiding individuals and groups in the mountains. The syllabus covers leadership, planning, rope skills, emergency procedures, flora and fauna and navigation. Lots and lots of navigation.
After booking a one-to-one day last week to try and get my head around contours (the wiggly lines on the map that tell you how steep the ground is), I’ve been on an intense map reading regime for the past seven days. It’s weird and fiddly and completely unlike what I used to consider navigation, which was more along the lines of: find the right path and run or walk along it as fast as possible.
It turns out that spending hours outside each day fully focussed on your surroundings - no podcasts, no mile splits, no agenda whatsoever other than being 100% sure of where you are on the map - is a pretty restorative experience. I feel calmer and more hopeful than I have for months.
Here are a few of the things I’ve noticed. Map reading lessons overlapped with everyday observations, I suppose.
You’d think that being out in the mountains would be a good way to reduce your screen time, but I don’t always find this to be the case. I spend more time than I’d like to admit checking the route on my phone and faffing around with whatever podcast I’m listening to. Using a paper map and compass not only reduces the need to look at a navigation app, but almost means I’m concentrating too hard to play anything through my headphones. Normally, a constant stream of podcasts narrate my entire day - I love alone time but I’m almost never actually alone with my own thoughts, and I think I was probably a bit scared to be. It’s felt really nice to just stick my phone in my pocket and only take it out for photos.
It’s so easy to be blinded by what you want to see. Contour navigation is all about using the curves of the ground to tell where you are, rather than overly relying on features like footpaths and walls and streams - which are unreliable, I’ve learned. A hill is always a hill but a path could be overgrown, a river dry or a wall knocked down. It’s easy to try and make the map fit. You tell yourself, I must be here because there’s this wall and this bridge, and you ignore the fact that there’s a dirty great big hill in front of you which is resolutely not there on the map. But you want to be there, so you make the details match up in your brain.