|  If we come to see the earth as alive and a self-regulating organism, then we might conclude that the desire for humans to visit certain special places in nature for contemplation, inspiration and perhaps even healing, is one way that the earth cares for us if we in turn show humility for the planet’s power and value to us. We care for the earth and it cares for us. In wild places, we can lose our personal ego consciousness and perceptual narrowness and unite with a much larger set of natural systems. Special places simply act as multipliers of this experience, giving us more of a chance for making extraordinary states of mind manifest.
— James Swan Daniel Boone was once asked if he had ever been lost in the woods. “No,” he said, “but I was mighty puzzled once for four days.” One thought that leads to comfort in the wilderness is that you have done everything you can to stay found, and that you know what to do if you get puzzled. Staying found, too, involves an understanding and appreciation of the sun and stars, as well as other ways of finding your way when the GPS falls on a rock and the compass gets lost in the river. More than that, there is quiet pleasure in lying on your back and looking at the night sky and being able to identify the stars and constellations like old friends. Remember, too, that Europeans are not the only ones to have looked at the night sky in wonder. And there is more than stars in the sky. There are clouds, rain, thunderstorms, and lightning, and it is good to be able to guess with some accuracy what is headed your way.
 David Burch, Emergency Navigation (Camden ME: International Marine, 1990), ISBN. 0-87742-260-5. Subtitled Pathfinding Techniques for the Inquisitive and Prudent Mariner, this book is designed for sailors who may find themselves suddenly in charge of a boat in the middle of the ocean without any navigation equipment. It thus covers such topics as steering without a compass, steering by the stars, steering by the sun, and steering by the moon and planets. In passing, it tells how to make an expedient magnetic compass. While there is much in here that is not of much use to the land traveler, who will probably not be steering by wind and swells, this clear well-written book is full of interesting information on seat-of-the-pants celestial navigation. Very highly recommended.
 Bob Burns, et al., Wilderness Navigation (Seattle WA: The Mountaineers, 1999), ISBN 0-89886-629-4. This is a brief introduction to fully equipped wilderness wayfinding, using map, compass, altimeter, and GPS. These authors wrote the navigation chapter in the classic text Mountaineering: The Freedom of the Hills, and here they cover how to read and use maps, the easiest compass techniques, the accurate use of clinometers and altimeters, techniques for using GPS, and wilderness routefinding in a variety of conditions and terrains. The book provides a series of practice problems. This is probably the best general introduction to using the tools of contemporary navigation in the wilderness.
 Geoffrey Cornelius, The Starlore Handbook: An Essential Guide to the Night Sky (San Francisco CA: Chronicle Books, 1997), ISBN 0-8118-1604-4. If you know the constellations, you always have friends to keep you company on cold and lonely nights in the wilderness. The virtue of this book is that it provides just the right amount of information so you can make friends with the stars. Each constellation is given in detail, with the meanings of the Greek and Arabic names of its prominent stars, and the myths associated with it, primarily the classical Greco-Roman myths, but including those of other cultures as well. It covers all 88 “official” constellations, includes star maps of the whole northern sky for each month of the year, and provides “signpost charts” to help you locate the more obscure constellations. Among many points of interest, although the author is somewhat delicate on the subject, it is now clear to me that the queen depicted in the M-shaped constellation Cassiopeia is actually in a most . . . well, unseemly posture. The Great Bear depicts part of a Greek story of rape, jealousy, and revenge. These stories can get you through the loneliest of nights.
 Harold Gatty, Finding Your Way Without Map or Compass (Mineola NY: Dover Publications, 1983), ISBN 0-48640-613-X. This is a reprint of Nature Is Your Guide: How to Find Your Way on Land and Sea by Observing Nature, originally published in 1958, and it is filled with useful and interesting information. It begins by discussing how early humans found their way and the importance of learning how to walk in a straight line. It discusses how to use your sense of hearing and smell in navigation, how to tell direction from wind, trees, anthills, stars, moon, sun, hills, and rivers, how to estimate distance and tell time by the stars. There are chapters on desert and polar navigation. He debunks the trick of telling direction by casting a shadow on your watch. The book is fascinating.
 Dennis Fisher, Latitude Hooks and Azimuth Rings; How to Build and Use 18 Traditional Navigational Tools (New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 1994), ISBN 0-07021-120-5. Part history of navigation and part project guide, this unique book includes step-by-step building instructions, full-size patterns, and instructions for use for eighteen historic navigation tools that can be built easily and inexpensively. Projects include the kamal, latitude hook, astrolabe, quadrant, astronomical ring, sundial, nocturnal, cross-staff, backstaff, dry-card compass, traverse board, hand lead, heaving line, chip log, weather glass, pelorus, sun compass, and octant. Some of these projects are more decorative and educational than useful, but others are important and practical tools for navigation.
 Ronald Goodman, Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology (Rosebud SD: Sinte Gleska University, 1992). Published by the Lakota-run university on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, this book is a thorough study of the sky knowledge of a single native people on the Great Plains of North America – the constellations they saw, the names they gave to the constellations, and the ways in which the stars and other celestial phenomena interacted with their mythology and religion. The stars were called “the holy breath of the Great Spirit,” and the Lakota saw a constant of mirroring of what is above by what is below; for example, the red clay valley which encircles the Black Hills is correlated with a Lakota constellation made up of a great circle of stars. This is a scholarly book. heavy on the details; but there is no question that, if you are looking for new ways to relate to the Earth, it will let you look in a new way at the stars.
 W.S. Kals, Stars and Planets: The Sierra Club Guide to Sky Watching and Direction Finding (San Francisco CA: Sierra Club Books, 1990), ISBN 0-87156-671-0. This is a new approach to reading the night sky. It does not start with the constellations, as do most other books, since constellations are arbitrary and hard to recognize, and in any event may be obscured by the horizon, or clouds, or nearby city lights. Instead, the book begins by teaching the recognition of the 21 brightest stars along the celestial equator. From there it moves to the constellations and planets, and discusses skywatching and direction finding at all latitudes from the tropics to the arctic. There is no question that the book is densely packed, especially if, like me, you found high school trigonometry to be a deep mystery. But the system really works.
 Bjorn Kjellstrom, Be Expert With Map and Compass (New York NY: Macmillan, 1994) ISBN 0-02029-265-1. Of all the introductory books out there on navigation by map and compass, this classic remains one of the best . With plenty of illustrations, the book builds the map and compass skill set by discussing how to navigate with a map alone, how to navigate with a compass alone, and, finally, how to navigate with map and compass combined. While much of the sections on the sport of competitive orienteering can probably be ignored by the wilderness traveler, the book does include hints on wilderness orienteering and making sketch maps.
 Lawrence Letham, GPS Made Easy: Using Global Positioning Systems in the Outdoors (Seattle WA: The Mountaineers, 2001), ISBN 0-89886-802-5. This little book is published by The Mountaineers, and it is brief, straightforward, and practical. The author is an electrical engineer who is also a hiker, and his book provides step-by-step guidance for using a GPS receiver in real-life outdoor pursuits. Thus, in addition to the theoretical material, there are illustrative sections on using UTM on a hiking trip, using UTM on a trip in the desert, GPS navigation in a whiteout, and latitude and longitude on a kayaking trip. This is all packed into a little more than a hundred pages, so the book is dense with information, but this is, in my opinion, the most practical book out there.
 Bob Newman, Wilderness Wayfinding: How to Survive in the Wilderness as You Travel (Boulder CO: Paladin Press, 1994), ISBN 0-87364-760-2. This book is a well written story-filled guide to wilderness navigation in the context of wilderness survival. While it focuses on the use of map and compass, it also discusses contouring, dead reckoning, the pace count, how to detour, and how to read the terrain and animal trails to help in wayfinding. Most useful is the unfortunately very brief discussion of primitive navigation, using the shadow stick, observing falling trees, and using the stars. I would have really liked more of that.
 H.A. Rey, The Stars: A New Way to See Them (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), ISBN 0-395-24830-2. This is a remarkable book. Rey is the author and illustrator of the famous Curious George series of books for children, and what he has done here is to give us an entirely new way to look at the constellations. He has managed to connect the dots – that is, the stars – so that the constellations, for the first time, actually resemble the creatures they are named after. You have to see this to believe it.
 Louis Rubin, et al., The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book (New York NY: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1989), ISBN 0-912697-10-5. This book is subtitled How You Can Forecast the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds, and that pretty much is what it is about. Forecasting the weather requires three steps: figure out which way the wind is blowing; look at the clouds overhead; match the clouds you see there with one of the 137 full-color cloud photographs in the book. This book claims the system is better at predicting swiftly changing local weather developments than weather maps or official area forecasts. The book also contains interesting information about weather and weather phenomena generally.
 Calvin Rutstrum, The Wilderness Route Finder (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), ISBN 0-81663-661-3. Cal Rutstrum was born in 1895 in Indiana, and he died in 1982 in Wisconsin. In between, he lived an unconventional life in the wilderness of northern Minnesota and Ontario and was, from the 1920s through the 1950s, one of North America’s most important wilderness writers. First published in 1967, long before GPS, this classic remains one of the best wayfinding books out there, and it has now been republished by the University of Minnesota Press. The book discusses maps and map reading, of course, and the use of the compass. But we also get a discussion by a master outdoorsman about why people get lost, practical routefinding, and the use of the stars in navigation – even the use of a sextant. It is like taking a hike in the woods with a wise grandfather.
 David Seidman, The Essential Wilderness Navigator (New York NY: McGraw-Hill, 2000), ISBN 0-07136-110-3. The author is primarily a sailor and a contributing editor to such magazines as Sea Kayaker, Canoe, and Boating World. Now in its second edition, his book on land navigation is designed for novices, and it is in fact an excellent first book on the subject. It covers everything from how to fold a map to using maps on CD-ROM. It discusses contour lines, types of compasses, declination, dead reckoning, route planning, and navigating in deserts, mountains, and snow.
 Alan Watts, Instant Weather Forecasting (Dobbs Ferry NY: Sheridan House, 2000), ISBN 1-574091-36-0. Alan Watts – no, not that Alan Watts – is a professional meteorologist who has written regular columns for yachting and boating magazines. This little book contains twenty-four color cloud photographs, and explains how each picture can let you forecast the weather in the hours ahead, and provide information on what likely weather trends will be. The photographs are associated with bad weather, with no immediate change, with sudden change, with temporary deterioration, and with improvement. A simple scientific introduction explains how to use the pictures, while the actual forecasts are set out in tables facing each photograph.
 Albert Waugh, Sundials: Their Theory and Construction (New York NY: Dover Publications, 1990), ISBN 0-84464-835-3. I love sundials; I find them mysterious, based on arcane trigonometric principles that I slept through in high school. Still, when I am under a big sky, I lay out rocks to mark the shadows marching across the earth. There are a number of books on sundials, but I like this one the best. Originally published in 1973, it has lots of history, lots of theory, and lots of different types of sundial packed into a small and inexpensive package.
 Ray Williamson, et al., Earth and Sky: Visions of the Cosmos in Native American Folklore (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), ISBN 0-82631-553-4. Native American star myths have been treated as charming stories, and they have rarely been recognized as what they are – an extensive body of tradition and acute observation. In this edited collection, seventeen folklorists and astronomers consider Native American starlore and its relation to specific observations of the sky. Rather than being another retelling of sky mythology, it relates clear descriptions of astronomical phenomena and mechanics to interpretation and ritual usage among the Navajo, Seneca, Alabama, Pawnee, Lakota, Apache, and other peoples. Rather than focus on ancient astronomies, the contributors consider ongoing traditions and contemporary usages. This is a broad perspective on the exciting new field of ethnoastronomy.
 Ray Williamson, Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), ISBN 0-80612-034-7. Many native peoples of North America were skilled observers of the sky, and the science of archeoastronomy has a lot to say about how they did, what they believed, and how their sky knowledge fit into the complex web of their cultures. There is no doubt that many Native American people carefully watched the heavens, charted the sun through the seasons, counted the sunrises between lunar phases, and marked the complex path of the Morning and Evening Star. This book discusses star knowledge among the Pueblo, Navajo, Pawnee, and other peoples, and at archeological sites from Florida to California.
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