Compass Orienteering for Beginners: A Complete Guide to Navigating with a Compass

Orienteering by compass means finding your direction by reading the magnetic needle against the four cardinal points and following a measured angle called an azimuth. While a smartphone or tablet can fix your position with GPS in seconds, a compass needs no battery, no signal, and works almost anywhere on Earth. That reliability — plus the satisfaction of reading the land yourself — is why a compass remains worth mastering.

The first step with any compass is to establish the four main directions: north (N), south (S), east (E), and west (W). Once those are fixed, you orient yourself in relation to the nearest landmarks or population centres, building a mental map of where you are and where you want to go.

Why does the compass arrow point north?

Why does the compass arrow point north?

The compass arrow points north because the northern end of its magnetic needle is pulled toward Earth's magnetic North Pole. The entire globe behaves as one enormous magnet with two poles, and a magnetic force field surrounds the planet. The magnetic force lines burst out of one pole in a powerful beam, circle the Earth, and rejoin at the other pole (Fig. 1).

These force lines are called magnetic meridians, and one passes through every single point on the Earth's surface. It is this meridian that "directs" the compass needle, setting one end toward the north and the other toward the south wherever you stand.

What is an azimuth and why do you need one?

An azimuth is the angle between the direction of the magnetic meridian and the direction to an object in your area — it gives you a far more precise heading than north and south alone. Knowing only the cardinal directions is not enough to navigate accurately; the azimuth (more precisely, the magnetic azimuth) lets you lock onto a specific bearing.

The word itself comes from the Arabic "assumut", meaning path or road. A ship in the open sea keeps to a course pre-calculated on a map, and crossing seas and oceans it arrives exactly at the appointed port. On land we do the same thing with a compass, simply using the word "azimuth" where a sailor would say "course" — for example, "course – 90°" or "course – 220°".

Magnetic azimuths are measured in degrees from 0 to 360° and are counted clockwise from the north end of the magnetic needle. In a sample landscape, the azimuth for a single house might be 300°, for a single tree 120°, and for a mound 60° (Figure 2).

How do you follow a direction by a given azimuth?

To follow a given azimuth, face the object, set the pointer to that bearing, orient the compass, and then sight along the needle toward a landmark. Once the azimuth is known, you can move confidently at night, in fog, in a blizzard, or through dense forest and still reach your intended goal. The procedure breaks down into clear steps:

1. Face the object or the general direction you intend to travel.
2. Set the pointer. By turning the lid, set the pointer — the yellow triangle fixed under the glass against the fly — to the given azimuth count.
3. Orient the compass. Unclip the arrow and align the northern end of its needle with the zero division of the degree ring.
4. Sight a landmark. Aiming as you would from a rifle, mark an object in the direction of the fly — a tree, a bush, a hillock — making sure the arrow does not drift from zero.

Until the skill is acquired, it helps to rest the compass on a post or stump, or to work in pairs: one person holds the compass and watches the needle while the other aims through the sights and notes the direction.

For practice, work out the azimuth from your house to the school, the store, and the cinema, and note the azimuths you follow going to school and returning home. Once you can determine both the sides of the horizon and azimuths, the crucial next skill is holding the chosen direction over distance.

When travelling, memorise the original north–south direction and constantly watch for deviations from it. For example: you first head north, then turn northeast at an oak tree, reach a large mossy boulder, and from it turn southeast to continue — each leg recorded as a change in bearing.

The "mischief" of the magnetic hand of the compass

The magnetic compass hand only roughly points north and south; the truly precise direction is given by the noon line — the line of the shortest shadow cast by a vertical object at astronomical noon (at 14:00 in summer and 13:00 in winter). The gap between what the needle shows and what the noon line shows is the root of the compass's "mischief".

The Earth rotates on its axis, making one complete revolution per day. That axis is an imaginary line passing through two opposite points where it meets the Earth's surface, called the poles. The pole facing toward Polaris is the North Geographic Pole, and the opposite one is the South Geographic Pole. All the Earth's meridians intersect at these geographical poles, so a geographical meridian passes through every point on the surface, its direction shown by the noon line.

The angle between the north direction of the geographic meridian through a given point and the direction to a local object is the true (geographic) azimuth, counted clockwise from 0 to 360° (Figure 3).

Why don't the magnetic and geographic poles line up?

The magnetic poles of the Earth do not coincide with the geographic poles, so the magnetic and geographic meridians point in slightly different directions, forming an angle called magnetic declination. This declination is not fixed for any location — it drifts slowly, typically within a range of 3–8°.

Over a single day the magnetic needle can wander about 1.5° from its average position, and during a thunderstorm by 2° or more. Across the territory of the former USSR, magnetic declination ranged from +25° in the Far North along the shores of the Kara Sea to −13° in the Yakutia ASSR; in Moscow it was about 7° and in Kiev about −4°.

What are magnetic storms and magnetic anomalies?

A magnetic storm is an irregular fluctuation of the compass needle triggered when sunspots increase on the Sun. In some places on the globe the needle suddenly swings sharply to one side, signalling a different cause entirely: large underground deposits of magnetic ironstone whose attraction overpowers the Earth's permanent magnetic force lines. This local distortion is called a magnetic anomaly — and where one exists, a compass can point you down the wrong route.

The largest magnetic anomaly on the globe lies in the Kursk region, where in places the magnetic arrow's declination changes by 130–170° within a kilometre or two. Other well-known anomalous zones include the Krivoy Rog area, a belt running from Odessa to Vinnitsa some 50–100 km wide and around 400 km long, and anomalies on the Kola Peninsula, in the Urals, and the Far East. In such places a compass simply cannot be relied upon.

Do the magnetic poles really move?

Yes — the magnetic poles drift continuously, and that wandering steadily changes magnetic declination across the world. Between 1948 and 1954 the North Magnetic Pole shifted northward, approaching the geographic pole by almost 150 kilometres.

The South Magnetic Pole "drifts" across Antarctica at an average speed of about 2 metres per hour. Magnetological observations show its general movement runs northwest, from Victoria Land toward Adélie Land; over the last fifty years it has moved roughly 800 km. Geophysicists calculate that in coming years the South Magnetic Pole will leave Antarctica for the Indian Ocean, and in some 200 years emerge over a new landmass in the south of Africa — a trend confirmed by the recently observed strengthening of the so-called South African anomaly.

There is even a region between the magnetic pole of the northern hemisphere and the North Geographic Pole where the magnetic needle cannot be trusted at all: under the Earth's magnetism its northern end points south and its southern end points north.

Compass Orienteering and the Story of Captain Hatteras

Captain Hatteras, the hero of Jules Verne's novel "The Adventures of Captain Hatteras" (1866), dedicated his whole life to one dream — reaching the North Pole. At the North Pole there is only one side of the horizon: south. You can only approach it from the south, both ends of the magnetic arrow point only south, and whatever direction the wind blows from it is always a south wind at the Pole.

Trace part of the journey of Verne's heroes. Brave Captain Hatteras, aboard the ship "Forward", left the waters of Baffin Bay far behind and, trusting the compass arrow, steered strictly west. Manoeuvring among small ice floes in Lancaster Strait between Baffin Island, Somerset, and Devon (Dundas Harbour), the ship reached the meridian of 96° west longitude (Fig. 4). There a course was set strictly northward, toward the Pole.

The helmsman followed the north end of the magnetic compass hand. When the sky cleared and the sun appeared, the captain checked his course by it and discovered, to his amazement, that the ship was running with a 180° error — southward toward the coast of the Boothia Peninsula. At the time of Hatteras' voyage, the spot where the magnetic arrow's northern end pointed south sat at 96° west longitude.

How far apart are the North Magnetic and Geographic Poles?

The North Magnetic and North Geographic Poles are about 2,230 kilometres apart — far from the close neighbours people often imagine. It is frequently said that the magnetic pole sits near the geographic pole, but if someone claimed Simferopol is "close" to Moscow we would treat it as a joke, and roughly 1,600 kilometres separate those two cities. The distance between the two northern poles is considerably greater still, and it keeps changing because the magnetic poles never hold still.

The shifting coordinates illustrate the point:

• 1831 — North Magnetic Pole at 70°05′ N, 96°53′ W.
• 1841 — South Magnetic Pole fixed by James Ross at 73° S, 150° E.
• 1903 — Amundsen placed the North Magnetic Pole at 70°30′ W, on the Boothia Peninsula in North America.
• Modern era — North Magnetic Pole on the Prince of Wales Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (74° N, 100° W); South Magnetic Pole on the King George V Coast of Antarctica (68° S, 143° E).

The lesson is that the compass arrow's northern end — usually coloured blue — does not always point accurately north. Yet there is good news for the practical navigator: when you determine the sides of the horizon by compass and move along azimuths calculated directly on the ground, magnetic declination, unless it is anomalous, does not affect the accuracy of your orientation.

The data behave differently when your azimuths come from a topographic map. There you must account for any magnetic declination exceeding 3°. It also pays to learn to find "natural" north — nature itself reveals how the sides of the horizon lie. With these secrets of the device in hand, orienteering by compass should now feel far more approachable.

Read also: orienteering in the forest.