Build Your Own Land Nav Lane for SFAS

Land navigation is one of the biggest reasons candidates go home from Special Forces Assessment and Selection. The Star course around Camp Mackall is often called the hardest individual land nav course in the Army. Candidates walk long legs alone, day and night, under a heavy ruck, across low sandhill terrain where one draw looks like the next. Like any skill, land nav is mastered by practice. Fitness, memory and a sense of where you are all come from walking, blistering your feet and working the compass and your head, over and over. Most candidates live nowhere near an Army training area, so public land close to home has to fill that gap.

In this guide

• Find public land near you where you can walk cross-country.
• Set 7 to 9 points following the Army manual's lane guidelines and keep their grids as your answer key.
• Plan every leg the way you will walk it: azimuth, pace count, handrail, attack point, catching feature.
• Print a true-scale 1:50,000 map with the MGRS grid and check it with your protractor.
• Share the lane so a partner or a whole group can run it.

Why train for the Star course on your own

Land nav is a gate, not only at SFAS. Ranger School, the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, MARSOC Assessment and Selection, the Expert Infantryman and Expert Soldier badges and ROTC Cadet Summer Training all test it, and a failed land nav test can end a course that the rest of your fitness would have carried. The same skill later runs through search and rescue, guiding and any job where you cannot count on GPS.

Unit training rarely gives enough repetitions, and a skill that fades between courses has to be built before you arrive. Training on your own means you choose the ground, the distance and the hour, carry the weight you will carry at selection, and run the lane as often as your weekends allow.

Pick the ground

Turn on the public lands layer and look for BLM, national forest or state land within a drive of home. Rolling ground with draws, spurs and small hills teaches more than steep mountains. It is also closer to the Sandhills around Camp Mackall, where the features are low and easy to misread. About 4 by 4 km is enough for a full lane. Add contour lines before you drive out, so you know the relief is there.

Set the lane

Switch the grid to MGRS. The Army's land navigation manual, TC 3-25.26, recommends 7 to 9 points per lane, 300 to 1,200 metres apart, 2.7 to 11 km in total, with three to four hours to finish. No stake waits for you at a practice point, so put each one on a feature you can confirm on the ground: a hilltop, a saddle, a road bend, the junction of two draws. With a partner, have them hang a marker at each point instead.

Drop a waypoint on each point and write its 8-digit grid on a separate sheet. That sheet is your answer key. The map you carry on the lane shows no points at all; you plot them yourself from the grids, the same as at selection. If plotting by protractor is new to you, start with how to read a military grid reference.

Plan every leg

Nobody walks a leg as a straight line through the woods, so do not plan one that way. For each leg, pick a handrail to follow, such as a road, a creek or a ridgeline. Pick an attack point close to the target that you cannot miss, and a catching feature beyond it that tells you when you have gone too far. Use terrain association along the handrail, then dead reckon from the attack point on azimuth and pace count.

Draw the leg as a route through those features and read the distance and azimuth of each segment. Check its elevation profile too. A leg straight over a hill often costs more than a longer one around it, under a ruck at night.

In the lane above, the first leg is 775 metres on a straight line. Walked, it climbs the draw east from Four Mile Road for about 830 metres to the saddle at its head, the attack point. From there it is 156 metres south to the knob that is Point 1. Overshoot it and you hit Big Flat Road, the catching feature, and know to turn back.

Convert distance to paces. Walk a measured 100 metres with the ruck you will carry and count every second step. Most people land between 50 and 65 on flat ground, and more uphill, at night and when tired. Work out the paces for every segment at home and write them next to the azimuth, so on the lane you only count.

The azimuths you read in the app are from true north, which is right for planning. On the lane you plot with a protractor on the printed sheet, which gives a grid azimuth, and your compass points to magnetic north. The north diagram on the exported PDF gives the G-M angle for that exact sheet. On this lane's sheet it is 12.4° east, so the 190° grid azimuth from the saddle to Point 1 becomes 178° on the compass. Subtract an east G-M angle, add a west one. On the ground, set the azimuth, pick a tree or rock on that line, walk to it counting paces, and shoot again.

Print it at 1:50,000

Army land navigation maps are 1:50,000, and your protractor is built for that scale. Export the map as a true-scale PDF at 1:50,000 with the MGRS grid and contour lines. Print it at 100%, with no fit-to-page, then lay the protractor on it: 1,000 metres on its scale should span exactly one grid square.

Print two copies. The one you carry is clean, with no points and no route. The second, with everything on it, stays in the truck as the answer key. Laminate the clean one or put it in a map case, and mark on it with a grease pencil.

Run a lane for a group

Few units have a dedicated land nav instructor, so one motivated person often ends up running training for the rest. Build the lane once, then share a read-only link with whoever sets out the markers. Give each candidate a start point and a list of grids, and keep the answer key yourself. Move the points every weekend and the same ground becomes a new lane. Walk every new lane in daylight first, then run it again at night, when the ground is known and only the dark is new. At night pick attack points you can find by feel, such as a road, a stream or a saddle.

Plot at the kitchen table

Between lanes, keep the protractor fast. Have someone read you ten 8-digit grids off the map, plot them on your printed sheet, then paste each grid into the map search to check where it really lands. Ten grids a night makes your plotting fast and accurate long before selection.

FAQ

Selection tests a skill you can practice every weekend. Open the map and set your first lane.