Last year, I realized I could brush up my map and compass skills by printing out a local topo map and using it to explore my neighborhood. I recently gave this a try and was richly rewarded.
Here was the first stop on my little adventure. One of the side streets near our home dead ends at a fence. It's hard to see, but on the other side of that fence is the Army Navy Golf Course with the clubhouse in the distance. I wondered if I could plot the location of this building on my map using my current location and terrain clues.
I grabbed my current location from the UTM/MGRS widget on my Garmin vĂvoactive 4 watch.* Alternatively, I could have used the GPS Test app to learn my UTM coordinates from my phone.
I plotted these coordinates using the map's grid lines and a Map Tools Mini Corner Ruler. I noted the location as 'C'.
A quick glance at the compass told me that the clubhouse was due South from my position. Looking at the contour lines, I plotted point '1' in purple as my guess of the building's location.
Once at home, I used Google Maps to determine the latitude and longitude of the clubhouse. I plugged these values into Backcountry Navigator to reveal the equivalent UTM values. Finally, I recorded these coordinates in purple on my map by again using the Mini Corner Ruler.
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTXjNeICw_fmH05KNS7SEr3rSuOU7hkAn07aNRvhdy0dlW5JmweSXafTme6yu2z7Qv_AwS0uQWLSwTTWVqA_WuYdrOhi7e7lNVRmgPc3yoo1Sf2gskT4ECSeR-SiJwGOJHmV6PzrNV2ouNaZ0DTiDRuR4zjXNsCUjC4nUv_uvooN_p-1jqoA/s600/Screenshot_20230131_083429_Maps~2.jpg)
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Success! As you can see below, my guess of the building's location agrees with the actual value. I repeated this process a handful of times: plotting known values in black, guesses in purple and actual values in red.
Most of my guesses were fairly accurate. I ran into issues with guess '2' because I incorrectly converted miles to kilometers. Curse you imperial units!
*Alas, I didn't grab a photo of the actual coordinates at the fence-line. The coordinates in the picture are from another part of my stroll, but the concept is still the same.
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