A few weeks ago a friend and I took my little Suzuki Samurai on some off-road trails in the Mark Twain NF. I wanted to find a spring that was marked on the Quad maps for the area. We used my GPS to get as close as the trail would get us and then used it to hike to the spring.

The GPS is an old Garmin eMap and it tends to lose it's bearings in thick forest so we wandered quite a bit on the way there trying to follow the pointer on the GPS.

Before heading back to the car I used my GPS to locate the car and a map and compass to get an accurate heading. Then, using the compass, we stood facing the direction we needed to go. At my buddies suggestion we then checked the direction the shadows laid.

We put the compass, map, and GPS away and started hiking back using only shadows as a pointer figuring as long they laid the same direction we should be heading the right way. It was only about a 20 minute off-trail hike back over rolling hills and across a couple small creeks in thick forest, and we hit the mark dead-on. It took us twice as long to hike in, but I tend to wonder and stop a lot on the way in so that doesn't really mean much.

Anyway, in all my years of bushwhacking around I've never tried that before. Don't know why I never thought of it. Obviously you'd want to stop and recheck your heading if you were hiking longer than we had to, but it is nice to use this method when bushwhacking short distances and all you need is a quick check of the compass to re-calibrate your shadow.