Not really lost, just a little off course...
I was hunting on the first day of deer season with my dad and my brother (almost a sacred religious ritual in rural PA) Monday morning. The plan was that my brother and I would push out a small peice of woods and that my dad would wait for us on the other side. My dad's health is pretty poor but he loves to hunt. This is about the only way that he can hunt anymore.

Anyway, I have been through this area about a thousand times in my life. It is literally just up over the hill from the family home. I spent my whole youth in those woods and I was utterly confident that I knew these woods as well as anyone, ever.
As my brother and I moved through the woods toward where my dad was waiting for us (on another road) I got to thinking "man, I don't remember this peice of woods being this big". Funny thing is that it isn't that big.
Then I came out on a road but it wasn't the right road. I was like "I don't remember this road being here." Turns out that we were on the road that we started out on about three hundred yards from our original starting point. We had made a semicircle and ended up heading completely in the wrong direction.

I had never considered a map and compass to be essential in this area because of how familiar I am with it, but I consider them essential now.

This time it wasn't a big deal. It just took a little longer to end up where we were going.
I am a little embarassed to admit this but it just goes to show that no matter how much you think you know what you are doing, things sometimes just have a way of sneaking up and kicking you in the butt. I am just glad that I learned this lesson in a relatively safe setting where it didn't do any harm to make a mistake.
It is embarassing, but I figured I should share it in the interests of keeping someone else from making a similar mistake (possibly under much more serious conditions).

A long time ago I read somewhere that most mishaps happen in the last leg of a journey, when folks start to relax their guard and anticipate the end, and I realized that's happened to me several times. The times I've gotten lost, it's most often been on the last leg, when I thought the decision making part of the trip was essentially over, and I made some stupid mistake, or missed something I should have seen. I've been able to compensate for the phenomenon a bit just by being conscious of it, and I no longer "let my guard down" until I'm ALL the way back.

It sounds like the same sort of thing happened here- where your familiarity with the area actually worked against you, by making you just a bit too relaxed about it.

As for map and compass, I learned that lesson in a slightly different way. Without going into a long story, unless you've experienced it, you just wouldn't believe how strange and unfamiliar even the most well-known trails can become in a heavy fog. The whole world changes, you can't see anything more than a few feet away, and nothing looks "right" anymore.

I hear you on the heavy fog.
There have been times I have had to pull over and make sure that I was still on the road.
One hunting season (again) I pulled my truck up into this old logging road and parked it there. It was early in the morning and It was foggy. When we came back to our vehicles at about noon, I found that my truck had been parked about 40 feet into the woods.
"Who moved my truck?" I wondered.
Then I realized what I had done.
I hadn't thought of that one. Thanks for bringing it up.

BTW - I went hunting again yesterday. This time I took the map and compass with me. Not going to make that mistake again. If they ever find me frozen to a tree stump somewhere, they will know that it is because of a different mistake.

Map and compass navigation is a great skill for sure. Now if I could only find maps for the areas I frequent. I have seen some nifty lookin US topo map software at REI of course it costs a small fortune if I remember correctly.

There are some nice software packages out there from "National Geographic"....and they will run you around $100 U.S. per state.

There is an outdoors store in a neaby city that has a kiosk that you can walk up to....use a touch screen interface, and then print off a 1:24000 or 1:32000 map on water/tear resistent "map paper"....and, it prints off on a legal size page with whatever point you want at the direct center of the map. They run about $8 a piece...but pretty nice since the area where my family's cabin sits is on overlapping topo quads....much less bulky than carrying two..

It is so easy to become disoriented. A couple of years ago my brother shot a deer on some of our land, and it continued running into the woods off of the SE corner of one of our fields. We tracked it for a ways into there.....darkness fell....cold, drizzly November evening.....and we got turned around. Fortuntely, I had a little Brunton keychain compass...whipped it out....and knew that, if we headed NW or N, either one, that we'd run into our property or a known road. Any other direction would have been a LOT of walking. (We found it, and it was tasty, by the way.)

Harley

I, too, have gotten lost a couple of times close to hove or in well known areas. To quote Daniel Boone (I think) "I have never been lost, just mighty confused at times."

I try to think about the lessons learned when I do stupid things, such as . . . always turn off the truck before using it as a shooting rest, or make sure your finger is out of the way before swinging the knife, or always keep track of where you are and where you've been when in the woods.

I've spent a lot of time in the woods from the time I was pretty young. Even though I haven't always carried a compass and/or GPS, I've always been very aware of the consequences of NOT keeping track of my whereabouts. But for some reason, on this particular turkey hunting trip several years ago, I just didn't pay attention to the rules. After all, I was just going to make a fairly short half-circle loop back into the woods off this straight piece of road. We were looking for turkey "sign" - on the ground. Well there's part of the problem. I found I just couldn't keep track of myself while doing all three of these things at the same time: looking down at the ground for turkey sign while looking up infrequently at fairly dense trees in an unfamiliar area while continuously walking. My normal MO is to walk a few steps, stop and make mental note and repeat until "home". Just continually walking with my head down for several minutes at a time in unfamiliar territory is not the smartest thing I've ever done.

So, what were the lessons learned? In order (1) never ever go turkey hunting. If you do go turkey hunting (2) be sure and carry enough money cuz you WILL be buying beer for your buddies after they've spent 3 or 4 hours looking all over you know where. And last but certainly not least (3) you know the rules . . . JUST FOLLOW THEM . . . ALWAYS.