This verse does not describe the party’s composition, but a basic outline appears in Ether 6:14. The “friends,” in keeping with the patriarchal emphasis are certainly male heads of household, accompanied by their women and children. Thus, the twenty-two friends (Ether 6:14), with Jared and his brother, constitute a rather small traveling party of twenty-four families.
Geography: Hebrew mythology associated Nimrod, the mighty hunter (Gen. 10:9), with the tower in Babylon:
Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them divers languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion.
If the Jaredites traveled to “the valley which was northward,” they logically went through the river valley of either the Tigris or the Euphrates. Both rivers drain into the Persian Sea and both flow northward. The Tigris runs more directly north and the Euphrates is more northwest. The headwaters of both are in the mountains east of the Mediterranean. Although the Jaredites do not know their final destination, they will cross water, meaning, geographically, that they will be heading for the Mediterranean. Although there is no evidence for either valley, I see the Euphrates route as more plausible, since it brought them more directly to the Mediterranean shore.