Many moons ago, when I was in the military, we only had compass and map to navigate with. We always did a lot of our travel at night without flashlights. The way all that worked was you needed to learn how many of your paces equaled 100 meters. So the "Ranger beads" were used to record each 100 meters. I used to take 60 paces on a relatively flat ground to cover 100 meters. I had 9 beads on a paracord then a knot and 5 more beads below. After all 9 beads reached the first knot, one of the bottom beads would be used to record a kilometer, up to 5km then start over. By keeping track of direction with the compass and knowing where you actually started on the map, we would know exactly where we were at any time. In theory. I can clearly remember people being miles off target and hopelessly lost with the rest of the team grumbling and shaking their heads. Usually someone was a good enough navigator to correct the situation before it got us too far off track.
I always used a Silva Ranger compass, still in fine working order after 30 years. A friend once asked me what the mirror was for, so I told him it was so you could readily see who was lost:)
What a difference GPS has made on the world! Nowadays it is possible to get plotting tools that are easy to use to plot a position on a map using latitude and longitude, MGRS, or UTM and more importantly you can find instruction on how to do it!
I probably had months of map, chart and navigation training in the military over my 20 years and never had a tool to plot lat/long except for my homemade scales. What a great time it is today! Cheers!
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No, I am not Bear Grylls, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night and Bear was there too!