Just took another "Advanced Hunting Clinic" class offered by CDFW, this one was a 2-day Land Navigation course. Our first day was all classroom instruction, our instructor made the point that you shouldn't rely on your GPS in the backcountry, so we spent half the day learning how to read a map and the other half on compass basics. There was plenty of talk about hunting aspects as he covered what kind of topographic features to look for when scouting. We got a lot of practice plotting coordinates on a UTM map from caltopo.com, which we would be using extensively during the 2nd day.
The second day we met out on public land and practiced using our map and compass to navigate to flags he set in various spots in the woods. After a half day of practice as a group, we went out solo to plot our assigned markers and navigate to them. It was pretty challenging but this was definitely the fun day.
So we all got our certificates and were told CDFW will invite us to intermediate, advanced, and night land nav courses in the future. I thought it was a steal at $50 -- looks like REI offers shorter navigation courses for $100+ and I don't think they'll talk about harvesting game in their classes
The second day we met out on public land and practiced using our map and compass to navigate to flags he set in various spots in the woods. After a half day of practice as a group, we went out solo to plot our assigned markers and navigate to them. It was pretty challenging but this was definitely the fun day.
So we all got our certificates and were told CDFW will invite us to intermediate, advanced, and night land nav courses in the future. I thought it was a steal at $50 -- looks like REI offers shorter navigation courses for $100+ and I don't think they'll talk about harvesting game in their classes
