I was organizing my gear bin when I came across my Suunto Clipper compass, which I had apparently forgot to attach to my pack – whoops! The clipper is typically shown as being attached to a watch band but I wanted something that would hold it much more securely than just the friction/pressure provided by the clip. Fortunately there’s a small hole in the back of the compass which you can run some cord through. Here’s what I came up with:

Top: bowline to middle chest trap loop. Bottom: bowline through compass hole. Middle: slipknot through bottom chest strap loop.

The Osprey Levity backpack comes with three attachment loops for the chest strap. Since I have the chest strap on the uppermost loop I decided to use the other two for the compass attachment. Starting with 14 inches of cord, I first ran one end through the hole in the back of the compass and then tied it off using a bowline knot. Note that the hole doesn’t go all the way through, you’ll have to feed it in and then out the side of the compass – this is harder than it sounds and you’ll need some skinny cord (I used LiteOutdoors 1.8mm). Tweezers would probably help to pull the cord through. In any case, I then attached the other end of the cord to the middle chest strap loop with another bowline knot.

Now we’ve got a compass dangling from the middle loop with just enough cord to be able to look down at it while holding it close to your chest (in hindsight 16 inches of cord might have been a better length). Finally, to prevent it from swinging around I put a slipknot through the bottom chest strap loop so that I could easily pull out all the slack in the cord but still be able to access the compass just by yanking on it. Success!

Now, originally I had tried to hang the compass from the gear loop located just above the top chest strap loop on the shoulder strap. However, the cord wasn’t long enough to be able to use a slipknot to tie it off to the lower chest harness loops, which meant that I didn’t have a way to keep the compass from flapping around. More cord might have made this work but I think the system I eventually came up with is better since there’s less cord to deal with overall and the compass never crosses the chest strap so there’s no possibility of tangling.

The jury is still out on how well this setup will function in the wild.