Hmmm, reading this just made me realize....weren't most of hte people talking about how you don't get lost easily because of landmarks giving examples from either england or california?
This is perhaps why I wasn't feeling right about what was being said. See, in the wilderness I'm familiar with, in a lot of areas if you are more than about 50 feet from a landmark it is likely useless to you, because there are too many trees in teh way (some mature forests are more open, good for a coule of hundred feet, but then again, it is less than 50 feet in many other cases where there is undergrowth). Plus the hills and ridges would anyway probably keep your range down to less than half a mile.
So sure, in areas you know really well, you always know where you are. On your home tula, at worst you know which hill or valley you are in, and what you have to do to find a landmark to guide.
That is, provided you didn't just go crashing through the bush to escape from a band of raiders, got turned around as you tried not to run into a tree or cliff or over a ledge, and then can't see clearly more than ten feet because it is nearly dusk and there is a driving rainstorm and of course the trees block most of the light anyway. At full dusk the temperature will fall to below freezing and you lost your cload and are soaked to the skin, so surviving the night outside is chancy. You know you are Erron's Hill, but quick, which way do you go to head back to the clan--your life may well depend on it. Oh, and the raiders are still about, so I don't advise yelling for help....
Or provided that you weren't tracking a something that has been raiding your herds when the snowstorm hit. You manage to find a shelter for the night, and in the morning there is shin deep snow everywhere. The deadfalls are well covered up, rocks have a different shape, trees are drooping under the load. You know you came from somewhere back over that way, but with the thick hazy clouds you can't tell where the sun is. How good is your dead reckoning of your route to retrace your steps out of here, when everything looks different?
In these sorts of situation, if you have wilderness survival, you will probably at worst get a marginal failure and stumble in after dark with a case of the sniffles. But it isn't something that will always be automatic when you don't have long sight lines.
--Bryan
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