clawj said:
In some areas I hunt the gps won't work anyways.
I don't get this statement! :? The only place my GPS doesn't work is in a house or under thick foliage in the forest! The latter is always corrected when I enter sparser tree leaf cover.
Using a GPS for returning to your vehicle, trail head or other access point is ssssoooo easy that I'm surprised by your other statement re: difficulty in using GPS.
In response to the original post, I got lost when I was a kid. Horrible, horrible feeling! And I was in a K-Mart at the time!
Then at about 12 years old I was hunting rabbits with my Dad when I wandered off. Sheer panic when I realized that Dad wasn't with me any more. Good thing he heard the .22 shots that I fired and responded with his shotgun.
I learned to trust compasses when I worked fisheries on Lake Winnipeg. We set a gang of nets "somewhere", chart the course (compass bearing) for the nearest harbour and kept track of our speed and time of travel. The next morning, clear or foggy, we'd fire up, reverse the bearing and head out into the open.
One time the fog was so thick that we stopped and dropped anchor after traveling the required time. We must have sat there for close to an hour peering into the fog all around us, looking for one of the buoys that marked our nets. The fog finally cleared enough that I spotted one of the two buoys within a couple hundred yards of us.
Compass or GPS, the operator just needs to trust the apparatus! TRUST IT! They work!