Hiking Project

We tools this app out for a spin over the weekend, and it was fantastic! Being able to browse all of the trails at a glance in the area (we were visiting Mt. Laguna in Southern California at the time) was fantastic. Finding a trail with just the right length was obviously great, but one of the features that proved to be quite invaluable was the trail highlight and GPS feature. Being able to double-check our location against the trail meant never wondering about whether we had taken the right spur (as there were multiple cross-crossing trails along our path) and at one point when we got lost in conversation, we were able to double-check our location and find that we had missed the narrow off-shoot we were to have taken while enjoying each other’s company. Another incredibly helpful feature was the elevation overview for the trail. Taking a look at it meant being able to ration energy and plan food and water breaks more easily, as well as determining when to take an impromptu break before one of the bigger gains in elevation along the trail. It’s been a wonderful, beautiful little app so far, and I can’t wait to see where else it takes us. Happy trails everyone!

Whether you are a novice to hiking or you’re an expert, this app is a must have. The Hiking Project is an awesome resource for planning your next hiking adventure; it also makes a great resource while on the trail. It’s trail library curated with excellent standards for photographs and GPS accuracy when submitting new trails to the system. The elevation graphs of the trails are extremely informative and so is the fact that the graphs are interactive. And most of all, this app allows you to accurately determine your own location on the trail in situations where you are conserving your phone’s battery by disconnecting from your cellular network or if you simply lose service. I still use good, old-fashioned maps of course but a multimodal approach to adventuring has always worked best for me. This app has helped increase my confidence and overall experience out on the trail. Whether backcountry camping or embarking on a day hike, I never play outside without it.

I used the app to pick a trail segment to hike on the Appalachian Trail. I was able to download the map in advance (very handy since there was minimal data service during the hike). During the hike, it was really handy to see our progress via GPS, see Scenic Looking Spots and view nearby segments. I would like to see information added to the app about when we have to cross a street to continue on the trail and step by step instructions to get to the next segment. It would also be handy if the firepits were marked. We reached the end of the segment, didn’t realize we had to cross a street to get to the shelter further ahead. Then, we spent 30 minutes of hiking searching for a campsite with a fire ring. We were so tired we almost gave up. I’m very pleased with the app overall and will use it to find more local trails and hike other AT segments in the future.

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I see no downloadable offline maps option, which is the core of what this app reports to be. Get on the bandwagon! It must be because it uses Google Maps API rather that the publicly available USGS topo. The best you can do is pre-view the entire route at a decent zoom level before you go in order to cache the Gmap as much as possible, but the result is varying quality and is very limited. It’s pretty crappy actually. The trail sharing community component on this app is probably great (especially because it’s free) but without an permanent offline topo basemap the app is pretty useless for its purpose. Sure I can make a breadcrumb trail with this app but I also want to use the same app to view my route options ahead, this especially when I’m taking an uncharted course. I’ll wait until to use this app until it uses a real offline maps (not just spotty cached map data and offline trail lines). It seems that they don’t intend to make this happen though as users have been asking for it for 3 years.

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I really want this project to succeed. But every time I record a GPS track and try to add it as a trail, I run into a klunky, hard to use interface that makes me wonder why I bother. I record my track. Now to add it as a trail, I have to go to my profile (Why?), select “Add a Trail”, then scroll all the way down to another page to use my recorded track. Then I get sent to the web interface, where map editing is impossible on a small screen. And why force me to edit the map? There are so many selections and descriptions to fill out after that. And tonight I did a big edit, and it was all lost. Clue: if “how do I recover my lost edit text” is on your FAQ, and the lame answer is “try your back button”, then your site is failing basic usability criteria. You’re not respecting the time I take to fill in data that your site can’t even bother to put into a buffer? Why should I bother? Make it easy to add a trail from the app (not the website) and make it reliable. Otherwise I might as well go donate my time to recording tracks for AllTrails instead.