National Adventure School, Land Nav Class

Had a great opportunity to get out on a Wednesday night and knock out a little training. National Adventure School (NAS) was putting on an Introduction to Land Navigation (Land Nav) at Gunfighter Tactical right off Miramar road in San Diego. The class was from seven to nine and it was really nice to have a weeknight class to go to instead of burning whole day on the weekend. The location was awesome too, Gunfighter Tactical is located off of Miramar Road between Highway Eight and the Fifteen so it is easy to get to after work. 

I’m always happy to check out guns before a class so I ogled for a bit and checked out some of the other cool stuff they have there. The class room was on their show floor so it was open well-lit and we had a table and chairs as well as a projector and drop down screen so it was pretty legit. Dude even had cold water out for us.

And this Dude was Brady Pesola the owner of NAS and all around land nav guru; he has been teaching it for years under is old company San Diego School of Survival (SDSOS) which has now been rebranded to NAS with a fresh approach to outdoor education. I have known Brady for a couple years through our work with Triple B Adventures and have seen him teach his field portion of land nav as well so I was really happy to take advantage of this course as a good refresher since these are perishable skills.  So I never look at “into to” classes as below me in fact I love going to them because while I might know a lot (ask my wife) I definitely don’t know everything (don’t tell my wife). Skills, practices and teaching is constantly evolving so it is important to get to classes when you can, I really dig the intro courses because they are often quick and to the point without taking too much time and money.

And this was the class for it; Brady did a great job in explaining many of the basics of land nav to us focusing on the Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) and Military Grid Reference System (MGRS). It was a lecture based class taught with Power Point and Brady did a good job of keeping us engaged and entertained. Lucky though it wasn’t all power points we did get to do some plotting and practical app from our chairs. All of the maps, pens, protractors and gear were provided and it was a fun little game of playing find where you are at on the map. I really suggest stopping by one of his classes and either getting introduced to land nav or knocking off the dust and doing some annual training. For more information on NAS checkout their Facebook page for future classes and events.