Can you find bearings without a compass or specialized equipment, and if so, how?

Question

I have two land features which have line-of-sight to each other but are separated by several miles. It's very easy for me to get to one of them, and very difficult to get to the other one. I want to plot both on a map. With a good compass it would be easy, just stand at the first one and shoot a bearing to the second, but I don't have a good compass (or any compass at all). is there some other way to find bearings within a couple degrees of accuracy with minimal equipment?

Things I do have:

- Plenty of time on my hands

- A good knowledge of trigonometry, geometry, etc, and a graphing calculator.

- Google Earth

- Sticks, stones, paper, cardboard, ruler, string, etc.......

Answer 1

Take a thin metal wire or a pin. place it on a leaf and put it in a small non moving water. let if flote the wire or pin will point towards North and south.

but which is north and which is south ?  remember sun rises in east and sets in west.

also rivers north of equator flows from north to south or north to south east or north to south west .

and the rivers south of equator do the opposite.

Answer 2

No need to measure bearings.

What you need to do it build yourself an alidade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alidade

And use it with a plane table.

An alidade is like a straight edge ruler with a sight. If you stand in several known locations and plot straight lines towards your point of interest and each other (this helps to orient the plane table), you end up with a nice map of the location by triangulation. On this map you can then measure distances and calculate your coordinate for the inaccesible location (I assume you can get coordinates and distances for other known location from lets say google earth).

This explains it a bit:

http://chestofbooks.com/crafts/popular-m...

Answer 3

Push a small stick into the soil. In the morning, mark the ground where the top of the shadow is. Do the same in the evening - the line between your 2 marks is East-West. Easy to then divide the angles to find your bearings...

Ash D - where on earth did you come up with that bit about rivers???

Rivers in the North running from South to North:

Mackenzie and St. Lawrence (both in Canada)

ALL major rivers in Germany except the Danube which flows West to East

Seine (France)

All major rivers in Siberia

Nile!!

Rivers in the South running North to South:

All major rivers in Argentina and Uruguay

Probably plenty more....

Answer 4

One easy way would be to find north via the north star and draw a line from one land feature to north. Then use your paper along with ruler and string to bisect angles until you have a compass face. Align it with the N/S line and check the bearing to the other feature.