(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article.)
Tracking
As I alluded to earlier, becoming an expert tracker requires a lifetime of practice and experience, but there are a number of things that you can do to begin developing and improving your ability to track people:
- Improved Endurance – The further away your target gets, the harder it will become to track them, and if they’re in better shape than you they’ll be able to quickly increase the gap between you. You need to be able to move long distances at a reasonable pace if you want to be able to successfully track people.
- Observation Skills – Since tracking is all about observing the environment around you to identify signs left by your target, enhancing your ability to spot signs can significantly improve your tracking ability. There are many good exercises that you can perform that will help you improve your powers of observation, but you need to get in the habit of practicing observation on a daily basis. The ability to quickly detect, identify and understand what’s going on around you is not only critical to tracking, it’s also the foundation of good situational awareness. One note on observations in tracking – it’s important that you not only pay attention to individual signs, but be able to recognize patterns made of up signs. You may not be able to determine if that slight depression in the bed of pine needles was made by a person, but if you stand back and see a series of those depressions 2’-3’ apart in an offset pattern you can more likely conclude that someone walked that way.
- Training – There are a lot of folks that have spent a lifetime learning how to track, and many of them offer some excellent training courses to pass that knowledge on. OnPoint Tactical (a SurvivalBlog sponsor) provides some excellent Scout training courses, and smaller local organizations may also provide useful training.
- Study – There are a number of good books and videos on tracking to help you develop your skills. I particularly like the book ‘Tracking Humans’ by David Diaz, but there are a lot of other good ones available. I also recommend the 2-part video series ‘Pro’s Guide to Tactical Tracking’ by UF PRO, and there are dozens of others available on the various video web sites.
- Practice – No matter how much you study, read or train, the only way to become a good tracker is to practice. Have a companion walk normally in front of you, stopping every 50’ or so to wait for you to follow along behind and identify signs of their passage. Try this in all different types of terrain, weather and lighting conditions to expand your knowledge of different types of sign. You can eventually turn it into a game where one person gets a head start and the others need to track that person before they reach an agreed upon destination. You can also practice by yourself by marking a starting point, walking for some distance, then looping back around to your starting point and identifying the types of sign you left behind.
- Recording – Unless you have an eidetic memory, keeping track of dozens or hundreds of different signs when tracking someone can be difficult, especially if you’re just learning. Is that the same shoe tread pattern that you saw an hour ago, or is it something else? Being able to answer that can make the difference between successfully tracking and losing someone. When tracking or even just practicing you should record information about each sign or pattern you identify, along with metadata such as date, time, conditions, etc. This can be done with a simple paper notebook or a note taking app on your cell phone like Microsoft OneNote or Joplin, but my favorite way of recording tracking info is using the ability to add location-specific notes, voice recordings and photos in the OSMAnd+ Android mapping application.