Navigation Class Fieldtrip

March 26th, 2011

After meeting at the Pierce College Outdoor Landscape Photoagraphy class Ray McDonald and I signed up for a Navigation Training class through the Tacoma branch of the Mountaineers. After two Thursday evening classes the course ended with an all day fieldtrip and examination at the Mountaineers "Irish Cabin" property near the CarbonRiver entrance to Mount Raineer National Park. Ray was unable to attend. The class began at 7:15AM and ended at 4:22PM.
The group of twenty students gathered together at about 7:15AM. Four students and many of the instructors came Friday evening and camped.
Several instructors
The students lined up and called out numbers 1 through five repeatedly. I was a two along with James, Monica and Denna. Denna has just recently moved to the Northwest from Pennsylvania. James was enrolled in climbing class. Monica was from Olympia.
Off the "2's" went to a corner of the Irish Cabin property to practice taking bearings as well as do a stride count. My count was 41 steps per 100 feet.
The Irish Cabin property parking area.
Each group of four was assigned an instructor. Our's was Gary or "Barbarosa" as he wanted to be called. Each carried a two-way radio and used it regularly during the day. Gary is nearest, wearing the hat.
We were given instruction here for the nav short "leap frog" and offset training course.
The 2's are given some instruction from "Barbarosa" at the short nav course. The course was about 150 foot square with six cones aligned along each border. They were labeled W1 through W6 on the west line, S1 through S6 on the south line etc, We were each given a cone to start at and 3 bearings. We would walk our bearings and record the cone we came to. Then record the cone found from each of the next two bearings. If wrong the instructors would make us repeat. I was wrong with my first bearing cone three times until the instructors realized that the first bearings target cone was wrong.. Monica was given a wrong bearing and spent about 15 minutes completely off the course.
Some Pancake fungus.
Monica and I were teamed together because we were both there for fun. James and Denna needed to pass to complete their climbing class requirements. In this photo we are being lead up a trail to our long nav starting point.
The starting point stakes. We climbed at least 500 feet above the road. The long nav course was about 0.3 miles.
James and Monica at the stake.
Our bearing was 308T.The slope was easily 45 degrees in places and very slippery. Monica is in the center of this photo waiting for my instructions to move left or right to a point directly along our bearing. After my alighnment she would take a back bearing at me to double check our line.
Some interesting mushrooms.
I liked these delicate ferns too.
More of the ferns.
More of the mushrooms

We reached the road and found that we were only 2 feet from our cone. I'm sure the best in the class

Team 308T Rules!