>>1974246ridiculing people for desiring competence in a backup skill (even if it's rarely needed in today's GPS-smartphone-app world) as if they were only doing it for the "hardcore points" ignores two facts:
1. even a 1% chance of failure approaches certainty at 100 hikes, and at 20 hikes you've a 1 in 5 chance of failure.
2. cultivating an outdoor skill (like compass navigation) reinforces resourcefulness and improves your own natural navigation in a way your iPhone does not. To put it another way: you may not seem to need math skills given the ubiquity of calculators and CAS, but we all know those who are adept at calculations probably still do better with math, whether or not they have calculators.
tldr: compass skills grow in value the more you hike, and learning them improves your "hiking skills" in general.
