Feel like your sense of direction is lacking? You're not alone. It turns out when it comes to orienteering, we may just be the weaker sex. by Cristina Opdahl

On June 9, 2007, Carol Swingle, a 60-year-old amateur photographer from Miami, walked with her camera into the Fakahatchee Strand, a 75,000-acre swampy wilderness, wearing flip-flops and warm-weather clothing. A few hours and many camera clicks later, after almost stepping on one of the resident alligators, she couldn’t fi nd her way out. Smartly, they say, she plopped down in one corner of the swamp instead of walking farther into the realm of the unknown and ended up spending two nights huddled under palm fronds to conserve body heat and hide from the local wildlife. She drank droplets of water from the leaves of plants and set her shirt out in the rain, later drinking the water wrung from it, before being rescued.

You could say that the online audience who read the news article about Carol’s ordeal were not impressed: “Duh . . . flipflops and sunshirt? Four letters: D-U-M-B,” wrote one.

“Idiots come in all shapes and sizes,” shot another.

There were those who defended Swingle: “What if that was your mom?” To which the reply came: “If this was my mom, she would have had herself a new alligator skin belt, boots, and matching handbag.”

“My family wouldn’t have any sympathy for me if I did something like that,” added yet another. “I know to dress appropriately for the woods.”

The general public is indeed impatient with those who get lost in the wild. Navigational mistakes look rather stupid when you regard them from your couch. Those who get lost make the grave mistake of overestimating their ability to get along outside of their own living rooms, and everybody loves it when someone gets too cocky and pays for it. It’s the stuff of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

For me, however, the humor hits too close to home, for I too—and too many times to admit—have been the bumbling idiot lost in the woods. None of my misadventures has yet made the papers, but they’ve been embarrassing in their own right. Once I got lost just 500 yards from my climbing partners, who came running when they heard my bloodcurdling scream of frustration. Another time I planned to follow a river for a two-day hike and ended up just following the curve of a mountain all the way to its backside, far from the river I meant to track.

What truly bites is that much of this might be related to the fact that I’m a girl. Differences in how men and women tend to fi nd their way in unfamiliar territory have been studied at length by cognitive researchers since the early 1980s, including Dan Montello, a geographer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In 1999 Montello put 43 women and 36 men through a long list of navigational tasks. Based on his findings and others like them, Montello believes there are innate differences between how men and women tend to navigate.

“Men navigate more with the survey style—a two-dimensional style,” says Montello, “which means if a man were asked to head in the direction of a distant landmark, he’s better at just heading in that direction. The contrasting style, which appears to be more common among women, is a route style, which involves a sequence of places. You know, ‘Go here, turn left, continue for 10 blocks . . . ’ Think of it as a chain or a string that is more one dimensional, with simple terms like right, left, or straight.”

Each style has its pluses and minuses. Those of us who use the route style function quite well normally. “You really see the differences when something goes wrong, when a map is drawn poorly or there’s a detour,” says Montello. When left without a sequence or directions, those of us who rely more on the route style are suddenly disoriented.

Montello includes the caveat that this generalization doesn’t speak for all men or women: “The diferences are average differences,” he says. “They don’t hold for everybody.

There are women who navigate really well, and men who navigate really poorly.” But the science of not getting lost doesn’t land quite in the favor of an average woman like me.

“In most studies of navigation, men learn routes faster and make fewer errors than do women,” says Deborah Saucier, a neuroscientist who studies navigational and other differences between men’s and women’s brains at the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience and echoes Montello’s findings of gender difference. Why this is so is possibly because men tend to score better in certain “spatial problems” like the brain teasers I remember chewing a pencil over in elementary school, in which you have to rotate some weird two-dimensional shape in your brain to get it to fit properly with another weird shape.

“Mental rotation shows the largest consistent sex diff erence (favoring men),” says Saucier. This becomes relevant only if you understand orienteering and navigation as some sort of similar mental problem—one in which you take two-dimensional information from a map or a trail guide, blow it up into a 3D diorama in your imagination, and correctly orient it to the sun (something that I’ve never been able to do). “Perhaps to get home again,” says Saucier, “you have to rotate the route in your head.”

I hadn’t heard of these studies years ago when I grew tired of being the follower with Christopher, my boyfriend and mountain bike riding partner. Whenever he and I encountered a fork in an unfamiliar trail, he’d sniff the air, take a look about, and decide which way to go. So one June morning I chose a trail out of a guidebook for mountain bike rides in New Mexico and declared myself trip leader for the day. We headed for Goose Lake, a ride near Black Mountain in the Carson National Forest north of Taos that promised a beautiful singletrack descent after a long steep climb up old mining roads to an alpine lake. That spring was a particularly chilly one, but I fi gured it was late enough in the season to attempt an alpine ride. An hour into the steep uphill climb on a mining road, we hit snow. We kept going, and the snow gradually grew deeper and deeper. We considered turning around, but we’d already come so far. I recited passages from the guidebook to push us on: “pristine, winding singletrack that follows a rippling creek.”

We forged on. Of course, what we didn’t fi gure was that once we reached Goose Lake, shimmering spectacularly next to a rough rock wall, the snow would cover the singletrack as well. Indeed, the Goose Lake meadow was covered in a beautiful and unfathomable blanket of white snow. There was no singletrack trail to be seen. We could have turned around and taken the roads back, but we really had come too far to turn back from singletrack now. Recalling that the singletrack followed the creek, I started for a creek that ran north out of the lake, and he willingly followed. It was narrow; the bank was steep and not for riding, so we slogged through the creek with our bikes, reckoning that we’d certainly run into the trail eventually. Our feet and legs were cold up to our bare knees. We walked and we walked, at first gingerly stepping from rock to rock but before long just stomping right through the water. At one point he let me know that this was the worst bike ride he had ever been on.

And it was, for we were slogging down the wrong creek, not the one with the beautiful singletrack trail. A trail emerged next to the creek—hallelujah!—then veered away from it and, a half mile later, suddenly petered out into nothing, absolutely, devastatingly nothing. As the bright afternoon light faded into the soft light of evening, we were running around mountain slopes, dragging our bikes behind us and trying to figure out where in the hell we were. I was feeling how thin my lightweight windbreaker was and how little water I had left in my CamelBak, and we were lost, totally lost. If we didn’t stumble upon something fast, we were going to spend the night on that mountain.

Other creatures fare much better at finding their way. The bobolink, a smallish songbird, flies confidently from its birthplace in Canada to warmer Argentina in the first fall of its life, a journey it takes at night. Arctic terns annually navigate 18,600 miles between their arctic breeding ground and the Antarctic. A population of Atlantic green turtles swims back and forth 1,400 miles from their feeding grounds on the Brazilian coast to their breeding site on a tiny island in the middle of the open ocean between Brazil and Africa. The diff erence between navigational abilities in male and female sea turtles or migrating birds—both males and females will fl y point in a formation—has not been an area taken up by research biologists (yet), although deer mice, voles, and rats have been scrutinized, and the females, like us, are much more likely to find themselves stumbling around in the woods, yelling for their climbing partners to give them some clue as to their whereabouts.

Perhaps this is related to the fact that we, like the female rats, were originally foragers who stayed close to our young. “People generally think that this difference reflects our evolutionary prehistory in which we were hunter-gatherers,” explains Saucier. “As men typically hunted over quite a distance, men with good ability to maintain reference to a point that could no longer be observed (e.g., home or north) had an advantage, as they could take shortcuts on the way back rather than retrace the route exactly. As women gathered, those who paid attention to salient features in the environment (e.g., the source of a high-protein food, such as a plant) had an advantage. These advantages were selected over time and are now translated as these differences in behavior.”

In comparison with the green sea turtles and the bobolinks, male or female we humans pale in navigational ability. In general, we get lost a lot. Some of us—many, even—perish as a result. No organization keeps track of exactly how many of us lose our way in the woods each year, although the numbers are greater than one might think. The Mountain Rescue Association (MRA), which oversees 90 teams throughout the United States, conducts up to 6,000 rescues every year. The ratio of men to women who need rescuing has not been documented to my findings. Those involved in search and rescue will say that most often it’s men who are the focus of a search-and-rescue eff ort, but that is simply because a larger number of men than women tend to venture into wilderness areas. “I haven’t seen any gender diff erence in rescues for men and women,” says Fran Sharp, president of MRA. “That is, it’s proportionate to how many men and women are out there.”

Christopher and I eventually stumbled into another creek and followed it downstream, where it joined yet another trickling stream. The bank flattened out a bit, and we could mount our bikes and ride cross-country. The fl attish bank turned into a trail—maybe the one we’d been searching for? It didn’t matter. We finally rode singletrack with the wind in our hair. (At one point Christopher, 200 yards ahead of me, encountered an angry mamma mountain lion, but that’s another story.) The trail met the old mining road, and the road, miraculously it seemed, led us to the parking lot. We arrived at my car in pitch darkness, blinking, overjoyed, and relieved, ears buzzing with adrenaline.

A friend, a former professional kayaker who loves exploring and stomping about in the woods, recently told me, “I love to get lost. I’ve gotten lost so many times.” She let her words trail off wistfully. We were sitting safely at a bar on the very street my house sits on, albeit several miles from it. “It gets easier, you know, figuring out how to find your way out.” She leaned in with a wry smile, “And you know, you need to get lost before you can be found.”

No doubt, there is no adventure magazine out there, including this one, that is not in love with the idea of being lost. It’s a fabulous idea, not knowing where you are. For someone like me, the sunny side of being lost means you are blissfully unavailable to make your preschoolers yet another peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and for others it no doubt means an escape from some other similar drudgery in their lives.

The dreamy idea of being lost hasn’t been, ahem, lost on Rebecca Solnit, who wrote an entire book celebrating the idea: A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking Adult, 2005). “Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction,” she writes. I gotta say, the real thing is no picnic. There is utter despair and real, gripping fear in getting lost, along with all that freedom from civilization. There’s also the utter shame of being the doofus lost in the woods. It drives home the reality that we are—even those of us who love being outside—not at home in the natural world, and we are always a bit out of sync with it, to which Solnit might reply, to quote again from her book, “To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty.”

Scientists used to believe that animals practiced their navigational wizardry by using the same clues we humans use for fi nding our way: the stars, the position of the sun in the sky, and landmarks. But recent studies have demonstrated that many creatures have what is essentially an internal compass. Magnetite, an iron oxide crystal that acts like a tiny compass needle, has been found in the cells of birds, bats, dolphins, honeybees, and other mammals. A few years ago, it was discovered that magnetite exists in us humans too. “Many tissues in the [human] brain are slightly magnetic,” says Joe Kirschvink, a professor of geobiology at the California Institute of Technology, who made the discovery (and whose son’s name, Jiseki, is the Japanese word for magnetite). Does that mean we humans have the tools for better navigation, perhaps atrophied in us from an overreliance on MapQuest? In birds and fish, there is a large nerve that is “the main conduit of magnetic information to the brain,” explains Kirschvink. “All groups of vertebrates have this nerve, including primates. Humans are primates. Go figure.”

So maybe there was hope for someone like me. This is what I was thinking when I went to see Joy Marr, a former raft guide and a veteran of one of the fi rst Raid Gauloises, a nowdefunct grueling 10-day adventure. Joy is now race designer and co-founder of Odyssey Adventure Racing, which holds adventure races and operates a training academy for racers that includes a course on navigation. Joy lives and breathes “nav.” As race organizer, she plots out a racecourse for biking, hiking, and paddling by going into the woods herself and making up a route. She must imagine where others might get lost when they follow her footsteps during a race, and she considers it her job to explore every trail out there to see where it goes.

“I’ve always had an interest in maps,” says Joy. “When I was a kid on vacation, I was the one in the backseat, going, ‘47 more miles!’ ‘122 more miles!’ and ‘That mountain on the right is Mount blah blah blah.’ So my brain is interested in it.” When her family wasn’t traveling, she and her four brothers and sisters were always exploring the beaches and the foothills of Santa Barbara, California, where she grew up. “We’d come in [from school], say, ‘Hey, how ya doin’,’ and go out the back door. All we ever did was hike, go into the woods, go exploring, scramble up here, over there, down into old washes. I defi nitely have been places when I was younger where we didn’t know where we were at all, but we were able to fi gure it out.”

For Joy, having a good sense of direction is something everyone can improve if they would spend more time with topographical maps and noticing landmarks around them, that is, thinking about just where they are located on this planet. Topo maps, inscrutable to many, just take practice. “Make yourself familiar with something simple, like in your backyard. Just get a topo map of your town—anyplace that has some topography— go there with your map, and go, OK, that’s what it looks like on my map; that’s what it looks like in the world. Start making those associations and you will be able to grow that part of it very quickly.”

To trigger a similar kick-start in my nav brain growth is why Joy and I are hiking somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains past rhododendron thickets and the kind of dense, young, scrubby forest that is common here. Earlier that day I pulled out a never-before-used compass from my gear closet. She’s brought topo maps and made me a map pouch out of a large plastic zipper bag and a nylon cord (a homemade version of the one she has hanging from her neck, along with her compass)— an adventure racing tool designed to keep the map front and center that might be useful for hikers like me, who tuck ours away in our backpacks next to the Lexan spice kit.

We take a trail through a reforested field, with young trees that had been planted in neat rows, before the trail dives into the woods. We soon find that it’s a trail, parts of which have been marked with pink plastic strips, some of the trees inscrutably numbered, with many forks. Joy is looking for a loop to take a group of campers on a short mountain bike ride for a rafting company for which she occasionally consults. “Oh, this will be good biking! This is great stuff to learn on,” she says as we head down the path, a wide singletrack with just enough rocks to make it interesting for novice bikers. I soon realize that the map I’ve folded into my pouch is simply a formality; although it shows a clear loop trail without any topographic lines, the trail we are hiking goes up and down the small contours of this forest and includes a lot of forks and spur trails that the map doesn’t show. Joy, 52, who has a hiking pace reminiscent of the Raid Gauloises, isn’t bothered. She points out that most topos were created in the 1920s and updated in the ’70s and ’80s, many only by flyover, and have certain limitations. Trails grow over; new ones are created. “Lakes dry up; you can’t count on finding those,” she says. We have to use our landmarks and our wits instead. We have taken several forks in the trail, each with Joy saying, “Oh! I wonder where this goes!”

We hike downhill for a half hour and then stop and look around. We are just above a narrow road. Joy laughs, “Man, we are . . .” She pauses. “Well? You know where we’re at? This is the back road to Burnwood [campground]. This comes down to Junkyard [climbing area], so this is great. I’m glad we took this. This would be a classic instance of going, ‘How did we get here? How do we get back?’”

We pull out our compasses and check direction—we’ve been hiking southwestish. Joy shows me how to “shoot a bearing” and do a dead reckoning, that is, figure out what direction I want to go, get the red-lined arrow of my compass to point to it, and head that way, checking that I don’t veer off. I’d whined to Joy about compasses earlier. What good is knowing a direction if you don’t know what to do with the information? What good is “east,” I asked, if you have no idea where you started or in which direction to head?

“Well, if you look at a map and know the lay of the land, generally speaking,” said Joy, “if you know that you’re on this trail and going that way, that you’re heading into the sun all afternoon and all you can remember of the map after looking at it is it’s a turn off to the right, then it does you some good. But I don’t know. I think if you don’t pay attention, then it doesn’t matter because you have nothing to apply it to. What good is it going to do me if I’m standing there going, ‘That’s east,’ if I can’t remember where anything is? So it does come down to some amount of personal awareness, which, if you’re traveling for a reason, you should have.”

We were hiking downhill, so we head back up the trail. After a spell the trail halts on the edge of somebody’s backyard. We’ve butted up against Ames Heights, a small rural town on one side of the forest we’re exploring. Joy laughs a tickled laugh and says, “This is interesting.” There are dogs barking in the distance. We stand there scratching our heads for a minute or two. “I didn’t see another trail,” she says.

It’s clear we are lost, although not dangerously so. The large patch of forest we were wandering around in is bordered by U.S. 19—from which we could hear the distant hum of traffic, an unmistakable landmark of sorts—as well as Ames Heights and two other rural roads.

Research has proven that Joy’s hunch that sense of direction can be improved is right. In a University of Alberta study, adults and children as young as six were taught some selected navigational techniques and showed great improvement. The subjects weren’t taught map-reading skills, figuring, perhaps, that a map is somewhat pointless if you’re really lost, but rather ways to keep your bearings by the seat of your pants. “The one that was most useful was called the ‘look-back strategy,’” says Edward Cornell, a behavioral scientist and one of the authors of the University of Alberta study. “This one is documented in anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer peoples. When you come to an intersection or a signifi cant site from your path, you pass by it and then turn around and look back to gain the perspective as if you were returning. It works remarkably well.”

From the backyard we turned on our heels and retraced our steps, and in a bit we ended up under a deer blind we had passed 20 minutes earlier. “Hey!” I say. “

Yeah, we’re back. This is where we’ve been. There’s the deer blind. Let’s just hope we don’t miss our turn again,” Joy says, laughing. There are three trails that converge here. One of them is much less traveled. I start to go down what seems to me the obvious route and she corrects me. “This is where we came,” Joy points as she lines herself up on the less traveled trail and motions to the blind. “We didn’t see the blind from that angle, we saw it from this angle. Let’s go back and see if we can find something we missed.”

From the deer blind we backtrack over our original trail, return to the reforested field, and find yet another trail, this one dipping through more-mature hardwood forest. When we pass a log that has been cut with a chainsaw, Joy points it out: “We call these mancuts—you come across these and you know you are at least somewhere where somebody goes.” We cross over a manmade bridge that spans a small creek and end up on a grassy knoll adorned with wooden park service signs and a lookout point. We check our maps. The loop is printed on a patch of white, clear and bright as day, nothing like the maze of confusing spur trails we had encountered. We never did find it. Joy is laughing, thinking of the article I’m writing on navigation. “This will be great—I got lost. I’ll be like, ‘Hey, it was this big on the map!’”

In a related navigation study at University of Alberta, researchers asked men and women to rate themselves on their navigational skills before giving them certain way-finding problems to tackle, and the women rated themselves as having a much poorer sense of direction than the men did, although their actual scores on the test were not all that shabby. “They tended to take more time; they tended to be more deliberate,” says Cornell, “which might be more related to sociocultural issues than ability.”

I started to realize during my hike with Joy that the most important part to not getting hopelessly lost, aside from trying to pay attention to where you are on the earth, is to hold off frustration and simply not freak out. There is one more thing that science can tell us about navigation, says UCLA researcher Dan Montello: Being lost or not is largely determined by perception. For someone using the survey style of navigation, “As long as they are going the general direction they believe they should be going, they feel all right,” says Montello. For a route-style navigator, “If she’s not on the right street, she feels lost.”

I deduct from this that winging it—even faking it, feigning confidence—seems to have some value in way finding. Act like the competent guide, don’t sweat some extra miles you may need to take to get back, and you’re nearly there. “Maybe there’s a quicker way to get there,” says Joy, “but don’t let that bother you too much.”

What women have a lot of, after all, is patience and perseverance. In July 2007 an experienced hiker named Mary O’Brien missed a trail turnoff and got lost on a day hike in Olympic National Park. Over the next five days, she rationed the few energy bars she had brought and one dehydrated dinner and slept under a piece of reflective foil. “My goal was to fly out on Wednesday,” she says, “and on every day after that, my goal was to get out on that day.” Mary, who had a map, headed toward where she believed was a large recreational lake, bushwhacking in the thick underbrush of a river basin to get there. She was eventually able to climb up to a high ridge to get a good view of her whereabouts. Early the next morning, she finally spotted some lights that were near the lake. She walked toward them and made it home.