Finding north takes five minutes. Keeping it for three hours is the real work.
ACT
Finding the four directions, by day
The shadow-stick method. It works anywhere on Earth, in every season, in both hemispheres. It's the only method you can say that about.
Plant a stick perfectly upright. Mark the tip of its shadow precisely with a stone. Wait fifteen to twenty minutes. Mark it again. Draw the line between the two marks: it runs east–west. The first mark is on the west side, the second on the east side. Stand with your feet on the line, first mark on your left: you're facing north in the northern hemisphere, south in the southern hemisphere.
Why it works: the shadow always moves the same way, from west to east, because the sun travels from east to west. It depends neither on the season nor on your latitude.
Solar noon. The moment of the day when the shadow is shortest. It then points north if you're in the northern hemisphere, south if you're in the southern hemisphere. Careful: solar noon isn't noon on your watch. Daylight saving time, your time zone and where you are within it can shift it by one to two hours.
Sunrise and sunset. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west — but only at the equinoxes. The rest of the year, the gap is real: up to forty degrees at mid-latitudes, more farther north. In summer, it rises in the northeast and sets in the northwest. In winter, in the southeast and the southwest. It tells you a sector, never a heading.
Finding the four directions, at night
Northern hemisphere — the North Star. It gives true north to within a degree, and it doesn't move all night. Find the Big Dipper, take the two stars that form the edge of the pan opposite the handle, and extend that line about five times its length. You land on a lone star of medium brightness: that's the one. Drop straight down from it to the ground: that's north. Bonus: its height above the horizon, in degrees, is your latitude.
Southern hemisphere — the Southern Cross. There's no visible pole star. Take the long axis of the cross and extend it about four and a half times its length. Drop straight down from that point: that's south.
The moon. Join the two tips of the crescent with a straight line and extend it to the horizon. The point you reach shows roughly south in the northern hemisphere, north in the southern hemisphere. It's crude — allow several tens of degrees of error — but usable when nothing else is visible.
Any star. Watch it for ten minutes, sighting it between two fixed landmarks. It rises: you're looking east. It sinks: west. It slides to the right: south. To the left: north.
Holding your direction
This is where everything is decided, and it's the step everyone skips.
The problem, first. Without a distant landmark, a walker circles. It isn't a legend: an uneven stride, a load carried on one shoulder, the sideways slope of the ground all curve your path, steadily and invisibly. In dense forest, in fog, at night, the loop closes within a few kilometers and you cross your own tracks without knowing it.
The fix: sighting from landmark to landmark. Find north. Pick out a distinctive, distant object in that direction — a lone tree, a rock, a notch in a ridge. Forget north. Walk to that object while watching where you put your feet. Once you're there, find north again, pick the next one, and start over.
The direction is no longer in your head, it's in the landscape. You can't drift anymore, because every error gets corrected at each new object.
With two people, the method is even better. The first walks ahead, the second stays behind and guides them by voice: "two steps left," "stop," "straight on." The second keeps the person in front lined up with a landmark behind — a tree, a stake, the place they came from. Two aligned points define a straight line; the person in front becomes the third point to keep on it. It's the surveyor's ranging principle, and it's the most accurate method possible without a compass.
Count your paces. A double pace — counting each time the same foot touches the ground — is about a meter and a half (5 feet) for an adult on flat ground. Count in hundreds, and mark each hundred by putting a pebble in a pocket. You'll know the distance covered, and a known distance turns a heading into a position.
ADAPT
No sun, no stars, no sky. Navigate by the terrain rather than by a heading. Valleys, streams and ridgelines have a continuity you can follow without ever knowing where north is. A stream followed downstream joins a bigger river, which almost always leads to people — humans have settled along water for ten thousand years, for the reasons laid out in Surplus, hierarchy and the first dependence. And along the way, you're following your water supply: see Making water safe to drink.
You need to reach a precise point on a line — a bridge over a river, a farm on a road. Don't aim at the point: deliberately aim off to one side, clearly left or right. When you reach the line, you know which way to turn. Aiming straight and missing by fifty meters leaves you in doubt and has you searching both ways; aiming off on purpose removes the doubt. It's counterintuitive, and it's the most rewarding technique in all of navigation.
You have a bike. It's the most efficient way to travel there is: see Le vélo.
You're walking for several days. Your heading is no longer the main problem: see Marcher longtemps.
You have a map. Reading it and planning a route are covered in Lire une carte.
Above all, you don't want to get lost. Follow a handrail: a road, a fence, a power line, a forest edge, a riverbank. No heading to hold, no possible drift, no attention to spend. It takes longer, and it's often the right choice.
Clues in the landscape
They never replace the sun or the stars. They confirm, or they orient you when you have nothing else. None of them can be read from a single example: you need to see the same thing repeat over several dozen meters before you believe it.
- Trees shaped by the wind. In exposed places — ridges, coasts, plateaus — trees grow leaning and their branches develop on the sheltered side. The shape can be read from a distance, and it gives the direction of the prevailing wind, not north. So you need to know where the prevailing wind comes from in your region. In Western Europe, it's mostly from the west.
- Snow and frost. On a slope, snow melts first on the south side in the northern hemisphere, on the north side in the southern hemisphere, because that side gets the most direct sunlight. On flat ground, snowdrifts stretch along the axis of the prevailing wind.
- Satellite dishes. Where people live, in the northern hemisphere, they point roughly south, because TV satellites orbit above the equator. In the southern hemisphere, north. A whole street of dishes pointing the same way is one of the most reliable urban clues there is.
- Old Christian churches. The choir traditionally faces east and the main entrance west. The custom was widely followed in Europe, less systematically in modern times.
- Birds of prey circling without flapping. They're riding a thermal, which forms above the surfaces that heat up the most: bare rock, plowed soil, a sunny slope. They don't give you north; they give you the position of a warm slope and the time of day it heats up.
What doesn't work
Moss doesn't grow on the north side. It grows where moisture lasts, which depends on the local terrain, the wind, the slope and the shade of the leaves. On a single trunk, it often covers three sides. It's the mistake people hang on to the longest, because it sounds natural and nobody checks it.
The analog watch method — point the hour hand at the sun and split the angle — works poorly outside mid-latitudes. The error explodes near the tropics, and daylight saving time throws it off by a full hour if you forget to correct for it. It doesn't replace the shadow stick, which takes the same time and doesn't get it wrong.
Anthills built against the south, fuller branches on the south side: the same flaws as moss. Too many local factors, too many exceptions, no reliability from any single example.
UNDERSTAND
You need to separate two things that the word "orientation" lumps together.
Finding north is a problem of astronomy. The sun and the stars move according to regular laws, and any one of those regularities gives you a direction. It's easy, it's quick, and once you know it, you don't forget it.
Holding a direction is a mechanical problem. The human body isn't symmetrical and doesn't walk straight. Walking experiments on ground without landmarks — thick forest, desert, fog — show that people walk in circles without any awareness of it, convinced they're going straight. It's that illusion that gets people lost, not ignorance of where north is.
Hence the hierarchy behind this whole sheet: a rough heading held straight is infinitely better than an exact heading lost after two kilometers. Someone who walks five degrees off north for twenty kilometers ends up about two kilometers from the goal. Someone who knows north to the degree but walks in circles ends up nowhere.
There's a practical consequence that scouts and soldiers teach everywhere: don't look for precision, look for repeatability. A crude method you apply every ten minutes beats a perfect method you apply once at the start.
One last point, and it may be the most important. Decide on your direction before you're tired. It's the same logic as in Building an emergency shelter: the decision is made while you're still capable of making it. Choosing a heading is a decision for a rested mind. After six hours of walking, fatigue will have you following the downhill slope, the easiest path, the wind at your back — and none of those go where you want to go.