What- Land navigation exercise
Where- Starved Rock State Park, please IM me for specific meet point
When- August 1st, 10:30 AM

Exercise specific required equipment-
1) Lensatic or orienting style compass
2) 1:25 map protractor
3) map pen(s)
4) A small ruler if your compass or protractor is not equipped with one.

Optional-  A amateur band VHF/UHF radio if you have one and a license to use it.

I will supply the maps. I can email the PDF file to anyone interested, but I've found that printing from the PDF copy skews the map a bit, at least on my printer. If you end up printing the PDF yourself, I strongly suggest checking it with a protractor before using it for the exercise.

Suggested equipment-
Things you would normally bring to spend a few hours outdoors. Water, snacks, etc. Maybe a change of footwear- you might get wet. The mosquitoes were pretty bad when I scouted the location so you're probably going to want bug spray.

Duration- this can be according to each individual's discretion. I will hopefully have marked enough points that it's unlikely that anyone will have time to find them all. For reference, the APC land nav qualification is 6 points in six hours, but I don't expect we'll go anywhere near that long. This will be a relaxed exercise aimed more at developing familiarity with the process. So participants can call it quits according to their schedule/preference.


Note- while this is not being presented as an instructional event, if you are totally unfamiliar this would be a good opportunity to get started. I am a newb myself but will be available for basic pointers/advice to anyone needing them, as I won't be participating in finding the points I just placed. There will also likely be at least a couple/few other people with enough experience to give a bit of advice. So if you have zero experience, don't let that keep you at home. You'll meet some new people and leave knowing more than you did when you got there.

I'd also recommend a GPS, whether it's a dedicated unit or a phone.  If you're new to the land nav thing and don't have a good gauge of your pace count, having the assistance of a GPS can help steer your first few points in the right direction and compensate for system errors (like map/printer scaling, or pace count).  

I was way off with my first few points, but after figuring out error stackup, I nailed the last couple of points "the old fashioned way".  

Good luck!

That is good advice and I said as much to someone just earlier today.

This event is not a competition and a GPS can get you back on track quicker than returning to a known point or messing about with plotting your current location, though you should be capable of both.

No shame in a reset for a practice exercise. It's a good learning aid. The question is does your GPS display MGRS or UTM, and can you convert if it doesn't?

Good event that I think went well. 11 attendees and 8 participants, all points were found and everyone found something.

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While we were there our group was also instrumental in getting aid to an injured hiker. An ILBB member actually witnessed the injury and was able to contact other members of our party via radio, as there was no cell service at the scene. ILBB informed park staff (who were useless, BTW) and EMS was ultimately notified of the event and location via our efforts.

We did draw a little attention due to the radios, attire and being off path a bit (one motivated member decided to scale a cliff, I'll let him speak up if he wants to) but nothing too bad. One of the cops that showed up for the injured hiker was inquisitive about what we were doing there with the radios, etc. and not in a not entirely positive way, but nothing came of it.  

All in all some good experience in both land nav and comms. As a bonus we were able to help someone and managed not frighten anyone too much in the process ;)

Great event.  I learned a bunch and now have (yet) another skill to work on.

Nice!