An outdoorsman friend has a habit I need to emulate.
He carries a compass. And he carries it every time he goes into the woods.
Usually, it's a mini compass he attaches to the zipper of a jacket or vest. It only costs a couple of bucks, but the little gizmo has gotten him out of sticky situations on more than one occasion, he says.
That's a good investment, an investment that has paid for itself many times over.
With fall hunting seasons hitting full swing, it's also a good reminder. Doesn't matter if it's woods, water, prairies or badlands; get in the habitat of carrying a compass every time you go afield.
As an ancient instrument of navigation, the compass might not have the whiz-bang capabilities of a GPS with detailed contour maps and other features. But a compass doesn't run out of batteries or fail to function properly in thick forests, either.
Much as I like my GPS, it has its faults. More than once, I would have been up the proverbial creek if the batteries had gone dead in my GPS or the unit had malfunctioned.
A compass is good insurance, and I need to get back into the habit of carrying one.
For me, carrying a compass should be automatic because I've gotten lost on a couple of occasions. Not to the extent that required rescue, but bad enough to take up several hours I rather would have spent in other ways.
It's no fun.
Perhaps the scariest encounter I ever had occurred about 15 years ago while ruffed grouse hunting in the appropriately named Lost River State Forest.
At more than 54,000 acres, Lost River State Forest offers a lot of room to be lost.
I was hosting a couple of friends from the Twin Cities that day, and we were on a trail through a cedar swamp I've hunted and walked dozens of times.
I knew it well.
So well, in fact, that the idea of getting lost never entered my mind. Nor, unfortunately, did the idea of carrying a compass on what was supposed to be just a short hunt before lunch.
I hadn't yet purchased my first handheld GPS unit.
The sky was cloudy that day, but conditions were pleasant for a hike in the woods. We had a couple of birds in the bag when I decided to venture off the trail and make a loop along the edge of a brushy area that bordered the cedars.
Grouse often favored the edge of the brush, I told my hunting buddies, and we'd follow the line between the brush and the cedars back to the trail.
To this day, I have no idea where I went astray.
If you've ever been in a cedar swamp, you know it's like something out of a Tolkien novel, eerie in atmosphere but strikingly beautiful at the same time.
If you've ever been lost in a cedar swamp, you know how the trees block out the sky and how everything looks the same.
We were lost within minutes. And with no sun to provide bearings, everything looked the same.
We'd been wandering about an hour through cedar trees that seemed as if they never would end when pure, dumb luck intervened. The cedars gave way to tamarack trees, and I stumbled onto a clear-cut path through the swamp.
Chest-high grass grew in the swampy path, but the cut through the trees clearly was an old logging road. What direction we were headed, I couldn't tell, but walking down a wet, overgrown road made more sense than stumbling through a 54,000-acre forest on a day when everything looked the same.
Following that grassy trail turned out to be the correct move.
If I'd been carrying a compass, I would have known we were headed in the right direction. But then again, if I'd been carrying a compass, I wouldn't have gotten myself and my hunting partners lost in the first place.
Live and learn.
As much as I don't know how we went astray that day, I don't know how we ended up where we did.
We'd been walking the grassy trail about half an hour when we came upon higher ground and a well-used trail through a stand of poplar and birch trees.
I took a right on the trail, which soon led us to another trail that looked familiar.
The truck was a few hundred yards up the road.
How we got there, I have no idea.
But I might have kissed the tires.
