Travel the Hiking Trails With the Hikepack
iOS: Roads are easy to navigate – just launch Google Maps or Waze, but finding your way through a forest trail usually requires a patchwork quilt of PDFs, paper maps, and apps that only work for one park or system. Hikepack aims to change that.
Hikepack uses data fromOpenStreetMap , which includes routes and often other features like bathrooms and campgrounds. In the app, you start by choosing a park and then you can see what it has to offer. The app knows the total distance and altitude change for each trail and estimates how many calories you will burn by following it.
In the free version of the application, you can view maps; With the Pro Pass (free for the first seven days, then $ 9.99 per year) you can track your location and enjoy some of the power user features:
- Download maps for offline use
- Plan your own route and see distance and calories burned
- Click on a facility (for example, a campsite or a water stop) and click “Take me there.” It automatically plans a route from your location to the object and counts down the distance as you get closer.
I ran through the app yesterday. I know most of the trails in my local park, but finding a new trail for a short time can be difficult as I usually don’t know the exact distance and it is difficult or impossible to measure on the maps I usually use. (Are you going to run two miles or five miles? Compare the scale bar to this squiggly line to find out.) But with the Hikepack, I was quickly able to find a trail I had never tried before, and I knew it was 1.7 miles. (I tracked this with a running app at the same time, and yes, exactly.)
Having GPS in the same app as the accurate route map app was a game changer. (Scary really get lost, knowing where you are and where the path, but not being able to accurately associate one with the other.) At one point during yesterday’s race trail forked, and I could not find any trace on any side, but for the application I realized that he had lost his way.
However, you should never rely on a digital desert navigation tool alone . GPS-enabled apps tend to drain power, but what happens if your battery runs out? (Thoughtful touch: The Hikepack notifies you when the battery level drops below 40 percent and suggests ways to save energy.) When on serious hikes or hikes, you should always have a paper map and compass with you, even if only as a spare. As for me, going out for an hour’s run in a local park makes me feel comfortable with the app because I know the park well enough that I am confident that I can find my way home without it.
There are only a few hundred cards in the app so far, but they quickly add them and accept requests. When I told a Hikepack rep that I wanted to try out the app but couldn’t find any maps near me, they quickly added my favorite park, as well as a few more of my state’s most popular parks. You can request new cards directly from the app and they will try to get them within two weeks. For now, they have park maps in the US, UK, Switzerland, Finland and Romania, and they plan to add Italy and Slovenia.