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Best app for creating and sharing hikes?
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I am creating a climbing resource of sorts, and while MP is often sufficient for approach beta, I also find it sorely lacking in many respects. (as one example, I need to be able to provide multiple approaches to the same destination). Hiking Project is no bueno because I can't create a dinky little trail in the app for me and all seven of us highway 4 climbers. All trails seems like it might work, but I would have to give them money, and being a cheap bastard I am allergic to such solutions. It seems that creating a strava segment and then following it is possible, but is highly inelegant and requires many steps on the part of the end user. I downloaded a bunch of hiking apps and what I thought was going to be a trivial exercise turned out to actually be really time consuming and frustrating. Anyone got the low down on what apps are good for creating a hike and being able to share it with others? Thanks! |
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What about Avenza? Used by foresters and others with a need for accuracy to a meter or so with capable gps |
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I've used strava at a crag with cell service to send my route to a friend meeting us later, it worked really well. For most backcountry/alpine applications, I use GaiaGPS. I do a lot of importing/exporting GPX tracks from various apps because I don't usually record in Gaia (although I have on occasion). |
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I use Caltopo, which I think has one of the better line creating functions. From there, you can export it out. I don't know how well the offline functions work in the phone app for the free version. For offline stuff, I just view it all in Gaia. Just export the GPX from Caltopo and have it available to download in whatever your buddies want. |
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Have you tried the MapMyRide app? You’d have to complete the hike yourself in order to map it (obv), but it’s free and you have the ability to save and share your maps. Bonus in that it shows your elevation gain throughout the path. I’ve used it to map city biking routes pretty effectively, but haven’t tried it on hiking trails. |
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Lots of great suggestions here. I'll try them all out. Thanks! |
Nolan Yahok wrote: Yeah, know about the app, been using it since it was beta, but I haven't tried downloading any maps for offline use - I don't even know if that's a free feature (is what I was getting at). I'm a Caltop freak in the sheets (erm, on the Desktop). I use it a lot as I am writing a hiking guidebook, but I've also just put up Caltopo maps for bikepacking routes to mountains too. I'm so down with the Caltopo, I wrote a whole blog post on how the elevation gain estimations are all off and within hours, they fixed it. I have a ton of Caltopo maps floating around, like this one accessing the 14ers from the CT. CALTOPO!!!! |
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Even Outdoor Prolink is spamming me about OnX. The FKT Podcast (which I love!) is sponsored by OnX. It goes on. I don't really have an opinion either way, but their ad budget seems pretty big. But hey if they can make a good phone app for MP, that is something that MP users said they'd pay for, so have at it, OnX.  |
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Check out Gaia GPS. Solid tool used by lots of hikers in my circle. |
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Strava is pretty good |
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Are you wanting to create routes that are public and easily seen by the public, or that you can send/share to people yourself? In my experience it seems like there are no good free platforms for creating trails for the public. Gaia and Caltopo are great for creating routes that are easily shareable as GPX files, and with multiple map overlays which is nice. I have the paid Gaia app and can download offline maps on my phone, so I usually will create a route on the computer and it automatically uploads it to my phone. Alltrails and Hiking Project always frustrate me when I try to use them, they're not very user friendly in my opinion. |
