I've had no time to update this blog... like, ever. But now that I'm in a training program to become a certified hiking guide, I thought it would be nice to document my progress here. I'm currently recovering from an emergency surgery, so it's not like I can do anything else anyway. I've made a dedicated page for this course, but I think I'll also have separate posts for my thoughts and opinions so that the "Terrain Book"'s page won't look too cluttered. Also I love how the progress bars look. It took me a while to figure out how to get those percentages show up at the end. :-D
... So I'm 1/5 of the way through "Terrain Analysis and Map Knowledge" by Miklós Halász, a total of 214 pages. We were warned that it was very technical, maybe a bit too technical for a 2025 audience (the book was published in 1987), but I enjoy it a lot. I took advanced geography classes in high school and in 9th grade I went to a national competition where one of the big three final challenges was orienteering, so I'm OK with "dry" geography-related texts.
First I wished I had my neon-colored highlighters on me, but eventually the other Zebra Mildliners proved to be perfect for the task. Yes, I'm one of those students who love colors and hand-drawn illustrations. For some reason certain people equate it with vapidity and/or procrastination, but even just the process of putting so much care into notes and annotations helps to memorize information. If you don't believe me, try it for yourselves! :-)
The First Two Chapters
Part I: The Map
This chapter is meant to refresh a bit of light math as it relates to the Earth's shape and the coordinate system, then it explains the basic principles of terrain cartography in general. Some stuff I've found interesting:
- the straight lines pointing towards North on orienteering maps have nothing to do with the coordinate system, and they are based on the magnetic north,
- apparently (i.e. I've never noticed) Hungarian maps, or at least some?!, use a special coordinate system. Its origo is the Gellért Hill observatory in Budapest, and believe it or not, the starting coordinates are 500,500. The numbers increase towards Northeast and decrease towards Southwest, each increment being one kilometer. This is also a reminder to myself to look up the northernmost etc. points of Hungary!
Part II: The Terrain
I never gave the definition of "terrain" too much thought, but now I know the definition: a portion of the Earth's surface with natural and artificial details—as opposed to "relief," the terrain's unevenness. Maybe there's a very obvious distinction between the two in English, but in Hungarian it always flew over my head. Maybe I'm a bit dumb, lol.
This chapter lists all kinds of natural features like vegetation and water and human-made objects like hunting towers. Descriptions are very practical with a strong focus on their usefulness in navigation, they also include aspects like visibility and walkability. I love this so much! Once I'm back at home (I'm currently convalescing at my parents'), I'll probably create my own little summary—including conventional symbols, because I was a bit annoyed that those were missing from the chapter. They are neatly listed in an annex, but I like seeing all relevant information at a glance.
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I've had a lot of fun so far, and it turned out to be super satisfying to use actual map colors to highlight headers like "creeks" and "forests". I want to finish the book until Thursday the latest, which I'm a bit anxious about, but let's hope for the best!
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P. S. (and I can't believe I forgot this before uploading the post,) here's my overall progress: