Navigating in the North

We recently had another week of navigating in the North.  There are actually several differences between navigating in the North and the South.  For instance, in the North there are forests, dense foliage, and a lot more populated areas, whereas the South is mainly desert.  As a result, navigating in the North is generally considered more difficult because it is harder to distinguish between channels and rivers due to the foliage, but some prefer the North because it is more interesting (I say some because I do not include myself in this group.  Personally, I prefer the easier navigations so that I can finish earlier and sleep more).  In the end the most substantial difference between the two is the seemingly endless number of fences, mostly barbed wire, that one finds in the North.  Along with all the dense foliage and populated areas comes the fields, which tend to be fenced.  I can say with experience that there is nothing more annoying than spending ten minutes trying to climb over or under a barbed wire fence with all of your gear only to find another ten feet from the first, or as often is the case as many as 4 or 5 in succession.  

Venting aside, it actually was a pretty good week for me.  We had 4 navigations throughout the week.  During each navigation you are given 3 points that you must reach along the way.  These points are then checked by what codes you find written at there.  At the end of the week I was rewarded by getting to go home a day early because I was the only person in our entire company who found all 12 of my points.  

Although I was successful in my navigations I can't say the same for my partners.  In each pair the navigation is divided into halves and each person knows only one half.  The reason for this is safety.  It is safer to navigate in pairs in case someone gets hurt.  Therefore, each navigation is essentially individual, but you have a partner who is along for the ride and in the dark.  Depending on your partners navigating aptitude it can often turn into the blind leading the blind.  This was the case in one of my navigations.  We set out at 10:00 PM on our navigation.  I navigated the first half and we arrived at the halfway point at midnight.  My partner then proceeded to lead us aimlessly in the search for his points.  I'll spare you some of the details, but in the end we spent 6 hours walking through the woods until we came upon a road.  We let our commanders know we were lost (we were supposed to have finished our navigation 3 or four hours earlier) and that we had come to an intersection.  They checked the map and informed us somehow we were a mere 2 miles away.  They then proceeded to give us 20 minutes to run to there location with all of our gear.

While getting lost is somewhat unpleasant, it in no way compared to what happened on my last navigation.  My partner navigated first and of course - got lost.  We had no idea where we were but had a general idea of which direction to walk.  We literally lucked our way into finding the halfway point, with a little help from another pair we saw along the way.  To my dismay we somehow managed to get there relatively early.  This meant we were sent back to look for the points my partner didn't find (although he didn't really look for them when he realized he had no idea where he was).  None of this really bothered me, the problematic part came next.  My partner's point was in a ravine, and when we got a half a mile away we realized that to get there we would have to traverse what amounted to a forest of shoulder-high weeds.  Now normally this would not be a problem, but at about 5 in the morning the weeds were covered with dew.  It only took about 2 minutes for all of my pants to get soaking wet, and for those of you who haven't seen 5 AM recently it is pitch black and cold, so when you are soaking wet you are really freezing.  This made for a miserable second half to the navigation.  The only upside was that it took my partner so long to navigate that the sun started rising by the time I started my half.