Simple Shadow Navigation Part 1

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Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathline school what I'd like to do this morning is show you a method of finding cardinal direction using your own shadow that I have been working on for the last couple months to try to make sure that it works different times of day and things like that and if you watch my videos you know that I've kind of been obsessed over the last couple years with shadow type navigation and I believe that navigation by shadows has been used for since the beginning of time probably but we know that the Vikings used shadow type navigation to navigate over distance and across open seas we don't know exactly how they did it because they never really wrote it down but we have some archaeological evidence and some writings that were made some years later that give us indications and there's been lots and lots of modern studies done on this type of navigation but I want to show you a little simple method today that you can use your own body to be able to determine the cardinal directions of north south east and west and actually you'll be able to once you practice this navigate over distance at least in a semi straight line and avoid lots and lots of lateral drift in the process and I say that's the key to this it also gives you a verifier if for some reason you think your compass is long there's been a lot of people that have been lost and it was because they didn't trust their compass they didn't believe that it was showing them proper direction and they just quit paying attention to it and they become more lost than they already are so you can use this as a verifying nothing to say ok yeah my compass is working fine I can trust it and move on obviously you want to carry some type of a proper navigation device but in the essence of primitive skills understanding how to recreate all of these things to include navigation devices is important ok so first let's talk about a method of understanding cardinal direction very quickly on the fly and the only thing we really need to understand to make this happen is we need to understand that the Sun moves across the sky or the earth rotates which makes the Sun appear to move across the sky at about 15 degrees every hour we also need to understand that we can count hands from the horizon up to the Sun or down to determine how many hours the Sun has been up or how many hours until the Sun Goes Down and then we equate that to one hour equals 15 degrees or simple math and then we're going to use our feet to make adjustments because we can tell by looking at our feet whether we are have our feet out of 90 or a 45 or whether we have our feet together and I'll explain more about that to you in just a second all right so first things first we know that the Sun rises in the east and we know that the Sun sets in the west

so we know in the morning that that Sun is going to be in the eastern sky so we have an eastern direction to start with an easterly direction and now we're going to count hands up or down from the horizon line or to the horizon line to the Sun to give us that calculation of how many hours of Sun has been up and remember that you're actually talking about the horizon line not a hilltop or a line of trees so when I look at that account now for borrowing time I go one two and I'm at two hours through the horizon line so two hours equates to 30 degrees at 15 degrees per hour you follow that we're ready to go to the next step okay for the next step in the equation what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn my body sideways to the Sun and I'm going to point my hand up at the Sun and make sure that the shadow beside me on the ground is even when I hold my hand out and it's not in front or in back of me I want that shadow dead in line with me what I'm doing is I'm creating an east-west line and I'm going to compensate that east-west line by moving my body to obtain a better north-south line now if I look at my feet and I hold my feet together I can now adjust my feet to get that angle differential of 30 degrees so let me get the camera set up on my feet and I'll show you what I'm talking about okay so once I have put myself in line with the Sun just like this and I look at my shadow on the ground and see where it's at I can look down at my feet and realize that this is 90 degree this is 45 degrees and a little bit less than that would be 30 degrees guesstimating and now I'm going to take this foot and move it to this foot so I'm facing in a forward direction and now I'm saying by adjusting my angle 30 degrees from that east-west line I now have a good north-south line and I would get my compass out while I'm practicing this method to verify that okay so what we're going to try to do now is we're going to try to get this on camera if we can only having the one camera you can see my shadow here and I'm now have the Sun here and my shadow is directly off to the side you can see it on the ground I believe in the camera and I have my feet together once I verify that that's all correct and I know I'm in line now I'm going to move this foot first to 45 because I'm looking for 30 and then to 30 and then put my feet together I'm saying now that this is my north-south line if I get my compass out and open it up I haven't already turned to North so I'm going to set it on the ground right here where my feet are facing just like this and I'm going to try to get the camera zoomed in on that for you hopefully you can see that what you've got here is this black arrow is the arrow that's on your clay meter here is your compass arrow and it's facing about two degrees off of dead North and still within the doghouse so we've given ourselves now a very very accurate north direction and obviously we can figure out east west and south from that okay that's step one of our shadow equation we can't verify a north-south east-west line fairly close just by looking at the Sun judging how many hours the Sun has been up or how many hours till it goes down adjusting our feet by simple angles to adjust our east-west line to the proper location which will make the north-south line fall into place and you can really do that in about 15 seconds on the fly so that would tell you that if I'm walking over distance and I'm leapfrogging in other words I take a reading let's say I want to go in a northern direction eastern direction of western direction or even some form of that in 45 like southwest northeast I can't make my adjustments figure out where my cardinal directions are and if I know this is north straight in front of me and I want to travel north west well then I can just take another 45 off of that put my feet together I'm going to be facing north west and I can then find something in my line of sight that I'm not going to lose sight of until I get to it so that I can walk a straight line

walk it out object and do the process again take another reading go ahead and count hands again to see if the sun's moved or not again you're talking about 15 degrees an hour so you've got about a 15 degree differential that you could be off here but 15 degrees over distance and readjusting every time you stop at a leapfrogging point is going to be a lot better than just haphazardly walking and hoping you can walk a straight line because without a compass you're not going to be able to do it unless you can see the object you're walking to and not lose sight of that object and that's the purpose of leapfrogging with a compass and taking multiple bearings or taking multiple readings on objects along the same travel bearing and it's the same thing that you're doing here if you know you want to travel north west you would just figure out what direction north west is at every single leapfrog point and keep going in that straight line so that tells you a very simplistic way of doing this on the part two of this video we're going to transfer this information to a shadow board to make it a little bit more

I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliant stoppers in the Pathfinder school I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for our school for family for business all of our sponsors instructors affiliates and firms and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys