Great App For Hiking

I have greatly benefited from the collective knowledge contained in this forum. It's been a bit of a parasitic relationship frankly in that I've gotten much more out of it than I've put in. I think it's time that I try to contribute a bit more on things that have made my camping/teardropping more enjoyable. I will start with an app that I recently bought which has definitely been worth the cost.

The GAIA app is available for iOS and Android. I've only used the iOS version. It has 3 levels of "membership", the free version is limited (no offline maps); the $9.99/year is the version that I bought and there are around 30 or so base maps that are available for downloading. There is also a $30/year version which includes Nat Geo trail maps and one other proprietary map system which I gather has costly licensing fees. I prefer "OpenhikingMapHD" as my base map for hiking. It has most of the hiking trails built in to the topographic maps in the areas where I've hiked and want to hike.

On a recent trip (the week prior to Christmas) to Laguna Beach, CA, I made it a point to hike each morning to start the day off right. I wanted to hike 5-7 miles daily. Using the Gaia website, I could scout out potential hikes in the area and then plan the routes. This would give me the planned distance but more importantly the elevation changes for the intended route. With this tool, I mapped out 5 separate hikes that were fantastic and were all new even to our host who has had the house in her family for generations. It is fairly straight forward to place the waypoints of a route on the laptop and then save it to a folder which makes it available on the phone app.

Another fun feature is to record one's track. It is kind of like an electronic bread crumb however with much more information - distance, speed and elevation changes. The tracks will then be saved on the map and viewable afterwards. In terms of battery life, it does a pretty amazing job of battery conservation - the gps will work in airplane mode and the app will use about 2% of the battery per hour of use tracking. For day hikes, battery use is a non-issue. If I were doing an extended multi-day hike, I would not track this way though.

With the basic $9.99, one can download the topographic maps of the area of interest to the most zoomed in scale. It's best to do this with a wifi connection as the maps can be pretty large. Once the maps are downloaded, the phone can be used without any cell service. Many of the places I like to camp and hike don't have cell coverage (even here on the East Coast!). For those Old Schoolers who always want a paper map, these can also be printed beforehand.

Here is a link to a more formal review which also has pics: Huge Improvements to Next Gen Gaia GPS Hiking App - Adventure Alan

 

Thanks for the info. I'm an avid hiker too and I still do a bit of mountaineering.

 

Terri does a lot of off-roading in her jeep in the Ocala National Forest. We have the Gaia 9.95 version and extremely happy with it. We don’t use all the features, but depend on it a lot when lost on the logging roads in the forest.

 

I checked out Gaia as well but decided on Backcountry Navigator.

Just finished a video walk through on it.

 

Hi Jay, Thanks for the in-depth review of Back Country Navigator. I've been curious about this app - I'd seen it on youtube on the Primal Outdoors channel on youtube. It looks like it has a lot of similar features compared to Gaia GPS but the user interface seems a bit more complicated. I haven't used it myself (only watched your video) but it seems that creating tracks and waypoint and saving routes etc is simpler with Gaia - but I guess once you get used to any system it becomes second nature.

I just renewed my subscription - this time I paid the full price of $19.99/year for the standard membership. Last year I got an intro rate of around $10. In terms supporting my hobby, this is some of the best money I've spent. I've done 30 or so hikes that I probably wouldn't have found or done without this app. A project that I want to undertake is to go through Green Ridge State forest and take a pic of each of the 100 sites within the nearly 50,000 acres. I'll include a brief description of each site for future reference and this will drop a pin on the map where each pic is taken. Unfortunately for us East Coasters, public land is much scarcer than for those out west and this is the closest thing we have to dispersed camping in this area.

If I lived out west, I would definitely upgrade to the premium version which includes a much more robust system of overlays (public versus private land, motor vehicle use maps in national forests, 48 and 72 hour weather forecasts). Around here though the main benefit is access to Nat Geo trail maps.

Kevin with the Lifestyle Overland channel on Youtube recently did a great review of Gaia. I'll link it here: