The Day I Discovered Contours
I'd say the east face is a little steep?!
I was bored of running up the same mountains. I was tired of looking for someone to show me new trails. I was frustrated that I couldn’t read my own map. I wanted to find my own way.
After a series of botched attempts at mountain running navigation I decided to bite the bullet and admit to myself I needed help. Professional help. So last year I signed up for the NAV4 weekend in the Lake District, a two day course ‘dedicated to the art of navigation for mountain marathons and adventure racing’.
Having already filled in a form admitting how useless I was at mountain navigation, it was straight down to business first thing Saturday morning. We were divided into small groups of twos and threes according to our abilities. Each group was then assigned an experienced instructor. With no further ado, it was straight onto the Lake District hills for a full day with our maps and compasses. We learned how to orientate our maps. We studied our symbols and scales. We were told how to find river junctions, crags and re-entrants. We learned to trust that our compass would lead us the right way.
Moire and the gang look lost...
And then our instructor divulged to us a secret that I had never before heard. All those connected lines and circles on the map actually had meaning: they were a wonderful thing called contours which joined land of equal height. It was like the mountain had been cut horizontally into big portions of cake and those resultant cake slices had been drawn around. We were then told how, though rivers may divert and paths may fade away, these cake slice contours would never ever change.
Just to prove how fundamental these contours were, our instructor brought us into featureless terrain. There were no paths or crags or rivers or forests to help locate ourselves. Instead there were undulating hills of endless grass, where each summit and cliff was carefully carved into our maps. We spent the afternoon journeying from re-entrants to ridges, from spurs to saddles. And by the end of the day, I was feeling like I finally understood my mountainous map and could finally find my own way.
Sunday was our chance to prove to our instructors and to ourselves that we had learned in a small scatter event. We had four hours to not only find twelve controls but to get them in whatever order we liked. Fortunately, we were allowed to plan our route choices prior to the event to make sure we minimised our climb and distance, whilst still maximising our score. Finally at two minute intervals we were then let loose on the hills, to confidently run and navigate to our hearts’ content.
A map is needed to navigate the tents at MMM too
To this day, I owe a large part of our 2009 win in the Mourne Mountain Marathon elite mixed class to what I learned at the Nav4 course. And here comes the plug… there just so happens that there’s another Nav4 course running 28/29th March in Borrowdale. Just imagine it: your days of being lost on the mountains could be over forever in less than 3 weeks!
