No Map No Problem Part 3 Height and Distance

Description

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

afternoon folks Dave camera at the Pathfinder school back out here at the Pathfinder classroom today what I'd like to do is discuss another video in our series no map no problem and talk a little bit about measurements today of height and distance across things like danger areas and height the things like trees how can we measure that both with our compass and without so that's we're gonna talk about today stay with me okay because we've been working with compasses during our navigational portion of this series let's first look at what we can do with our compass to judge height of a tree judging the height of a tree with a compass can be done two ways it can be done by percentage of grade or it can be done in degrees of angle depending on whether your compass is capable of doing that or not your compass will have to have an inclinometer on I'm gonna show you what that is right now okay this is the inside opened up of a kar Alpine compass just like we sell on our website and you can see there's a little dial down here that's moving as you tilt the compass that is a clinometer and what it does is it measures the degree of angle that that compass is tilted so if I am measuring the height of something I'm looking up this plane I can fold this over and look at it in the mirror so I can see that and I raise this up aiming up this to the top of the object that will give me a degree reading of what the degree is to the top of that object from where I'm standing that's important to understand

now with the K in our Alpine you also have a chart on the front of this thing a conversion table that will convert degrees to grade or percent of grade and that can be important too if you're using a gradient method to judge height so stay with me we're going to talk about this on the whiteboard okay to use our client a meter to figure the angle for us to figure out how tall the tree is what we're going to do is we're going to position our mirror so that we can see our clinometer in the mirror and we were going to aim straight up our compass just like this and back away from the tree until we've established a 45 degree angle on the client meter while looking at the top of the tree with our compass so we need to move back or forward distance away from the tree in a lateral line until we get that 45-degree angle so if our tree is here and the ground is here and we're standing here we've got our clinometer pointed up toward the tree and we're aiming like this when this angle here becomes 45 degrees on our clinometer then this distance from where we're standing to the base of that tree is going to be very close to the approximate height of that tree the only factor we don't have involved in that is our height and if you take that 45-degree angle and you walk this off and paste it and you add your height to it or add five or six feet to it you're going to be pretty close close enough for what you need as long as you are overestimating to begin with if you're gonna fell a tree you want to overestimate a little bit how tall it is if you're gonna fell a tree across a danger area you need to go all the way across something to use for a bridge you're gonna want to overestimate anyway so if you're only five or six feet off it shouldn't affect you okay now on the back of this compass on the outside of the lid of the kar Alpine model compass there is a conversion table here from degrees to gradient percentage my glasses on excuse me guys so it goes from degrees here to the percentage here so you just correlate that column of degrees over to what the percentage is the reason that's important is because that allows you to do things a little bit different what you can do is you can't do the same thing your tree is here and you can walk any given distance that you want from the tree out so let's just say for sake of purpose we're standing here with our with our compass in our hand and our climbing are out and this distance from here to here is 80 feet just to pick a random number an even number okay what we're going to do is we're going to take a reading from where we're at to the top of the tree and then we're going to take a reading to the bottom of the tree or the base of tree and what that's going to give us going to give us two separate angles we're going to have saengil and we're going to have this right so once we've got these angles let's say this angle is 63% and this one is 7% once we convert them from what the actual angle is to the percentage that's that's important to understand this is a percentage of grade so we have a 63% grade here at 7% grade here we add that number together and that gives us 70 now what we're going to do is we're going to use that percentage times this lateral distance which is 80 feet and that will equal the height of that tree so 7 times 8 is 56 so that tree is 56 feet tall I hope that's understandable we take two readings here this is our level line of world we're standing and looking we take one angle to the bottom one angle to the top we convert that degree reading to a percentage in this case 63 and 7 we add that together to get our percentage which is 70 we times that by the distance we are away from the tree which was 87 times 8 is 56 so our tree is 56 feet tall okay so let's talk about figuring the height of this tree without using a compass what we're going to need is something with an even amount of increments on it or increments that are evenly spaced it doesn't matter what the spacing is as long as they're evenly spaced in the back of this axe has one inch increments burned into it so we're gonna use this acts as our measuring device what we're going to do is we're gonna walk up to the tree and we're going to put something around the tree at about five feet high using five feet is a good round number so I'll take a piece of paracord or something a piece of some type of rope anything like that that I can see from a distance I'm going to wrap around that tree at the five foot level then what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my axe I'm going to walk back away from that tree and I'm gonna hold my axe up and tell him far enough away from that tree that inside these increments that I've got right here inside of one space captures this five feet so I've got to be far enough back that when I'm looking at this with my dominant eye just like I was aiming this at the tree that that space it's taking up inside one increment of this axe so I've got my axe in my hand here it's got even increment markers on it once I've got to the point where I'm far enough away that this is covered by one increment then I look up and I see how many increments on my axe it takes to get this so if this is one and I look up in the top of the tree is up in here then I count those increments okay one two three four five in this case it's six then I take six times this five feet and that equals 30 feet - should be the height of my tree or close to that close to that 30 feet is gonna be the height to my tree so I just have to have something with an even amount of increments in it that are evenly spaced doesn't matter what it is in this case we're using the axe again we're going to mark five feet or some even number that's easily divisible on this tree with a rope a ribbon something that we can see from a distance we're going to walk backwards until we can capture that marker to the ground inside one increment then we're going to look up the marker and see how many increments up it is to the top of that tree we're going to count the increments and times it by this number of five and that's going to give us the height of that tree okay so let's go back to the compass for a minute let's talk about the distance across something like a Swiftwater crossing what we're going to do is very simple let's say that this is our Swiftwater crossing and on this side we have a tree what we're going to do is we're going to get right in front of that tree we're going to point our cup set tree and we're going to take a bearing on that tree a visual bearing so let's just say that our visual for sinking purposes 325 degrees that was our visual bearing from here to here now what we're going to do is we're going to either walk left or right you know straight alliances we can walk until we have a differential of 45 degrees from our original reading so it's either going to be minus 45 degrees or plus 45 degrees depending on which way we walk but it has to be a 45 degree differential once we've done that we've created a 45 degree angle here which means we've created a 90 degree angle here and this distance and this distance are equal so once we've got to the point we have our 45 degrees we can put another pin in the ground right here we can walk back to the original pin that we put in the ground we took our bearing and that's important put a pin in the ground when you take that original bearing walk left or right of that get your 45 degree differential put another pin in the ground paste that just nuts off and that will give you the distance across now you could do it both directions if you wanted to just to double-check yourself you can go left one time go right the next time and make sure if they're pretty close but the 45 degree differential is what's important because that 45 degree angle will give you a 90 degree angle here which will give you equal lengths on both sides of that triangle so this length and this length will be equal okay so now let's talk about the same scenario but we don't have a compass so we've got our swift one across it we've got our tree we're standing right here in front of the tree what we're going to do is we are going to put a stake in the ground right here and this is going to be a the trees going to be X we're going to pick a number that's easily divisible so let's just say for sake of this example 20 we're going to walk 20 feet in a straight of lines we can walk and we're going to put another stake in the ground then we are going to walk again half of that distance so we're going to walk 10 more feet and we're going to put a stake in the ground here so we have three stakes in the ground we have when we started we have one this is 20 feet this is 10 feet we put a stake in the ground now what we're going to do is we're going to start walking away from the creek with another stake in our hand until we can put a stake in the ground and eyeball line those up so that this stake so that this stake and this stake and this stake in this tree are in a line okay in a straight line once we get that we put our stake in the ground and we paste this distance right here that distance will be 1/2 of this distance because you have two triangles that are half the size of the other so this triangle is half the size of this one this distance is half the distance of this so whatever this distance is once you get to this angle it's going to be half the distances across so let's say this is 25 feet when we pasted it off that means the distance across this water is 50 feet so basically you're just making two triangles instead of one because you don't have a compass to figure things out you've got to do it by angular vision and this will force you into that triangle so even if you don't have a compass you can still figure out distance you can still figure out height it's just a little trickier to do it without the compass okay folks well I appreciate you joining me I heard the Pathfinder school today for this simple lesson in measuring height and distance using your compass and using just the natural environment around you these are very important skills to understand there's probably a lot of people watching my videos that already know this stuff

but there's probably a lot of new guys watching my videos that I've never heard of any of this stuff we're going to put another video together probably tomorrow the next day on a few other little tips and tricks for measuring but I wanted to get this one out of the way first you get added to our no map no problem series guys happy new year I appreciate everything you do for me for my school for my family I appreciate all your comments of your views I thank you for everything you do for the Pathfinder school and everyone at self-reliance Outfitters I'll be back the other video in this series soon as I can

Happy New Year guys you