What you said. That’s pretty much what you encounter bushwhacking cross country in a lot of mountains I’ve been in. It ain’t a walk in the park, following a compass, that is for sure.
I’ve on at least one occasion taken a hike through old pine forest that had been neither burned nor logged for at least a half-century, probably more.
It had a lot of trees that were dead and in varying stages of “falling down”; some down and rotted, some level and not on the ground, but too low to easily crawl under, others at an angle such that you had to either duck to get under them, or go out of your way to get around them.
I had a GPS receiver with a waypoint marking where I was going, and it provided a distance and bearing to get there.
However, unless I was moving at least 2 mph, it wouldn’t provide an arrow indicating which direction that bearing was. In that forest, there was nearly impossible to do 2 mph on a consistent basis. I knew generally which way North was, so I could make an educated guess at which direction that bearing was, and I was somewhat familiar with the area so the GPS was really just a backup and I could find my way using landmarks.
(To the assembled multitude:)
EVEN IF YOU HAVE A WORKING GPS RECEIVER AND THE SATELLITES ARE WORKING, YOU NEED TO HAVE A COMPASS, TOO!