Mark your entry point before you walk in

Updated 5 August 2026

There is one habit that separates a pleasant walk from a search party, and it takes about ninety seconds at the edge of the trees: record the exact spot where you left the road. Everything else — the track, the arrow, the phone call — is built on that one point.

Why the entry point, specifically

Inside a forest you cannot navigate by landmarks, because there are none that stay distinct. What you can do is navigate towards a coordinate. And there is exactly one coordinate that matters: where you came in, because that is where the car is, where the path is, and where the road out is.

Distance is not the problem — people rarely get more than two or three kilometres from their car. Direction is the problem. A saved entry point converts an unanswerable question ("which way is out?") into an answerable one ("which way is that point?").

iPhone: drop a pin in Maps

Open Apple Maps, press and hold on your current location until a pin drops, then tap Add to Favourites. Or, faster: open the Compass app, which shows your coordinates at the bottom — screenshot it. A screenshot survives an app crash and needs no signal to read back.

Android: save the place in Google Maps

Long-press your location on the map, then Label or Save to a list. Do this before you lose reception, so the map tiles around the pin are already cached. Download the offline area for the whole forest while you are at it.

Where these methods let you down

All of them save a point. None of them get you back to it, and that is a different job:

• You get a dot, not a direction. A pin on a grey offline map tells you where the car is on screen. It does not tell you which way you are facing, and in a forest you cannot tell by looking.
• Straight-line distance lies. The pin says 1.4 km. Between you and it there may be a marsh, a river, or a ravine. The line you walked in on is known to be passable — the straight line is not.
• You have to remember to look. Saved pins sit in a list you must find, in an app that wants a connection to search.

Better: a breadcrumb trail

A breadcrumb trail is your own path, recorded as you walk — a line of points every few seconds. It solves both problems at once. You can follow it back along ground you already crossed, and it works as a record of where you have and have not been.

The cost is battery. Recording a position every few seconds for six hours is roughly a third of a modern phone's charge, which is why apps built for this let you trade precision for battery life: a point every 5 seconds for detail, every 30 for endurance.

What to check before you walk in

• The entry point is saved — pin, screenshot, or a recording app started.
• The offline map area is downloaded (why offline maps matter).
• The phone is at full charge; a power bank is in the bag.
• Someone at home knows where you are and when you are due back.

If it goes wrong anyway, the sequence for that is here: what to do if you get lost in the woods.