Most of us think of our smartphones as tools that let us stay online on the go, but they’re equally amazing for their offline capabilities. With the right apps, your phone can grant you access to everything you need to plan outings, stay safe, and have fun out in the wild.
To enjoy mountain hikes and forest trails to the fullest, redundancy is the most important step of the planning process. That means having multiple backups to help you navigate and stay safe even if you encounter problems. For instance, because smartphones can run out of charge, you should always carry a high-quality portable power bank. Similarly, because smartphones can be dropped, lost, or smashed during a trip, you should also have a backup paper map and a physical compass. When it comes to apps, it’s a good idea to have map information downloaded across multiple services, partly in case of technical difficulties, and partly because different maps show different information.
Aside from keeping you safe, smartphone apps are also a perfect way to enrich your outdoor experience, helping you find good deals, interesting information, and great ideas for your next trip. With all that in mind, here are five apps that you should definitely install before your next hiking trip.
iNaturalist
Starting with a fun one, iNaturalist is a great nature app that you can use every time you leave the house, not just during planned hikes. The premise is simple: When you see a plant, animal, or insect that grabs your interest, take a photo and upload it to iNaturalist. Its photo-recognition technology will provide an educated guess of the species, and then community members will confirm or correct the identification. When enough people have verified your observation, it’ll be granted the “Research Grade” tag, which means it can be shared for use in research.
While the locations of your observations are an important part of the data, you can obscure the exact location for added privacy, and it’s common for people to do this for sightings that occurred close to home. Most people are quick to snap a photo when they see something cool out in the wild, and this app is a nice way to organize your photos and share experiences while also contributing important data to biodiversity research.
The app is free to use and available on both iOS and Android devices. If you’d prefer to completely avoid sharing data and photos, you can use the company’s other app, Seek by iNaturalist, to identify wildlife privately.
Recreation.gov
For outdoor activities within the United States, the Recreation.gov website (and app) is a treasure trove of ideas and deals. It can help you find hiking trails, nature tours, outdoor activities, campsites, lodgings, picnic spots, boating activities, and areas for hunting or fishing. It’s also a really easy way to apply for permits and enter lotteries for popular events. It also keeps all your passes, permits, and tickets available offline, so you can access them even in remote areas.
The Scan & Pay feature for campsites is also useful, giving you an easy, offline, and cashless payment method to use at participating campsites across the country. This is a government website that focuses on federal land managed by various agencies such as the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management — but this is hardly limiting when you consider the many hundreds of millions of acres of federal land across the states. The app is available for free on iOS and Android.
AllTrails
AllTrails is one of the most popular hiking apps in the U.S., with over 500,000 trails to choose from. In addition to searching via a map or location, you can also specify “trail features” such as forest, wildlife, partially paved, kid-friendly, and more. Every trail includes community-contributed photos, weather conditions, interactive route maps, reviews, and basic information such as the length of the trail, difficulty level, and total elevation. Because it’s such a popular app, many trails have thousands of photos and reviews. This greatly improves your chances of finding the exact information you’re looking for, and should help you develop a much more detailed understanding of the trails.
You will need to sign up for a free account to access the trail information, and you’ll need to pay an annual subscription fee of $35.99 to enjoy offline maps and trail conditions. There’s also a higher subscription tier for $79.99 a year that includes a plant identifier and allows you to build your own routes in-app.
If you’re planning on doing some overseas hiking, make sure to check out popular regional alternatives to AllTrails. For example, Komoot is an essential app for any hiker and is popular in the U.K. and Europe, while Yamap is the go-to app in Japan.
Gaia GPS
While AllTrails is perfect for browsing trails, when it comes to actually navigating them, many people prefer Gaia GPS. It costs $3.49 a month for detailed offline maps with hundreds of different layers, including historical and recreation sites, cell coverage, rain, smoke, and avalanche forecasts, wildfires, private land, air quality, snow depth, and much more.
All of this detailed location-based information makes it a lot easier to plan your trips and pack for the right weather and conditions. On the day, you can download all of the maps and layers you’ll need during the hike to make sure you stay on track. If you only want to pay for one app subscription rather than multiple, using a combination of the free tier of AllTrails and the paid version of Gaia GPS is a popular option. You can never have too many offline maps, however, so there’s no harm in paying for both services if you want to — as well as downloading map sections on Apple Maps, Google Maps, or whatever Google Maps alternative you use.
What3words
If something goes wrong during a walk or hike in a rural area, your biggest enemy is time. Making sure help can find you as soon as possible is essential, and the What3words app can help you with this. It’s a system made specifically for sharing precise locations, where every 10-foot (three-meter) square on the world map has its own unique address of three everyday words. For example, the exact location of the Boadicea statue on Westminster Bridge in London is “dimes.glare.spare.” The app can tell you your current What3words even when you’re offline, and the system is widely used by public safety teams in the U.S.
Literally every inch of the globe is covered, so you can share a precise location even in the middle of a forest or somewhere out in the ocean. Rescue teams are very good at their jobs, but the amount of time it takes to find you is always determined by how well you can describe your location. With this tool, you can achieve an exceptionally high level of precision in a very short amount of time, making it perfect for emergencies.
On a lighter note, you can also use it to make records of specific locations. If you see something amazing during a hike, you can use the app to get its unique address and remember its exact location. Then, you can share it with others or use it to find the same spot again in the future.
