 Spears were high Monday morning on July 5th at Cadet Summer Training as six Regiment Advanced Camp Cadets awaited the start of their land navigation test. So what exactly is land now? Land navigation is all about knowing where you are on a map, using a compass to find that and using a whole bunch of other weird techniques. Basically, you're going to get a map, a compass, and you're going to try to find the points. Just find points in the middle of the woods. Too many of us having to use a compass, map, and protractor to find a location seems outdated and difficult, especially with the invention of the GPS. But technology is not perfect and sometimes it fails, but don't worry because these cadets are willing to share their tips and tricks. The best strategy would obviously be just hand railing, just hand rail the roads. Find your trails and send it out on the points and if you don't know where you are just use your terrain features, use your attack points to locate that. Hand railing is following a terrain feature such as a river, road, or trail to find your point. If this doesn't work, one could follow the aged old rule of following in someone's footsteps. There are a bunch of cadet trails going through, just where hundreds of people have stomped through. If you can't find one of those, usually dead reckoning and just trucking through bushes and trees, just trying to find a point. Dead reckoning is the basic idea of going a certain distance in a certain direction to find a point, regardless of what technique cadets choose. Confidence plays an important role. In the morning I was really doubtful. I was not confident about how. I would get to complete this. So this time what I did was terrain association and basically trusting all of the equipment and everything that I did in the process and trusting myself. Terrain association is a comparison between what features are on a map to what landscapes you physically see. One last tip is not to overthink and to revert back to what you know. I think the biggest thing I learned was to turn off your brain, you know, just really just engage with what you know and what you've written down and followed the steps and, you know, in cases where you might get lost, you might feel lost, you know, just turn off your brain and just go back to what you know. Stop following your map all the time. Reporting for the CST Public Affairs Office, I'm Kelsey Steiber.