Walking not on streets with a 3790LMT

So... i'm guessing you ticked the Car icon beside the satellite strength meter on the main screen and changed it to Pedestrian? Them i'm guessing you went into tools/settings/navigation/pedestrian and checked the appropriate under "Limit Walking"...like... less than 5km? Then you disabled all Public Transport?
See...this unit is not really designed for what you want to do UNLESS you install Topo Maps like i have. Then it almost works, it will get me out of the bush walking, as long as i could do it in under 10 minutes..lol otherwise the battery would be dead. It will never replace a Garmin handheld.

Well I didn't spot the car icon on the home page while I was out of the rocket site and used another method to get into pedestrian mode, but after I saw your post I tried the method of pressing the icon to make the conversion and it was no help. To rephrase my question: does anyone here know a way to get a 3790LMT to not use roads?

Check the offroad setting on page 9:

http://static.garmincdn.com/pumac/nuvi_3700_OM_EN.pdf

Thanks for the heads up on that setting, had no idea it was there on my 3790.

Yes, indeed (and for others who might use text search, Garmin puts a space in, so Off Road).

That is indeed what I failed to find.

To save others who might find this thread for looking it up in the manual:

Home page |Tools |Settings |Navigation |Automobile |nuroute|Calculation mode |Off Road |Save

Then, when actually selecting the desired waypoint and pressing "go" one needs to select "drive" not "walk". As walking still selects roads.

You still don't get a compass rose, but it does draw a straight magenta line to your destination, and the "I'm here" icon still appears. The magenta line as first drawn remains, so is no longer the shortest way to your destination once you have detoured around a prairie dog hole cluster, but will help you regain your original path if you are using a horizon tree as backup azimuth indication. While there is no explicit compass rose arrow or such as a "go this way" indicator, the finish flag displayed at your destination will be centered in the screen if you are currently moving directly toward it. Also the distance to go and ETA fields are usefully engaged (not inflated by assuming your are going to detour to use a road).

So, while far from ideal, this is all far, far better than what I was obtaining while I was actually rocket-chasing. Thanks CraigW.

By the way, the user manual linked above does not say this is down under "automobile" , but that is where it is for the software (as Garmin calls it, firmware as most of us term it) currently installed on my 3790LMT, which I believe is up-to-date. And it only provides the ignore roads behavior I want when one selects driving--for walking it still selects roads.

Good idea on the off road vs. offroad for us Googlers. Thanks.

You've added a lot of info for future folks with your problem. The off road option is definitely buried in submenus that the average person would never find. But the biggest gain you've made is showing that off road routing only works with the City Navigator map when in automobile mode even when you'd think you should be using pedestrian mode.

I expect there's one more way you could achieve your results. By going to the MyMaps page and disabling City Navigator, you may get your desired off road routing while seeing the Garmin basemap. Even better for folks doing this a lot is to install a non-routable supplemental map like a topo map and select the topo map while deselecting City Navigator. As long as the nuvi has no "routable" maps active (City Navigator or the OSM maps), the nuvi can not follow streets and I'd expect all directions to a location would be as-the-raven-flies.