A Backpacker's Guide to Maps | Hacker News Reader

A Backpacker's Guide to Maps

outsideonline.com

187 pointsbryanrasmussen68 comments

If you're an amateur like me there's one thing you can/should do with no downside: download the area you're going to using Google Maps offline feature.

It's not super detailed in backcountry but it will have major trails, major/minor bodies of water, and it will let you leave little GPS breadcrumbs for yourself when offline.

On weekend trips this has definitely made me more comfortable and it requires no skills.

I will usually take screenshots of the aerial maps of an area I'm going to hunt - it's not usually a large area, so you don't need that many, and aerial photos detect important features for navigating through heavy bush (like a bluff line, or gorges/canyons on small streams) that aren't shown on our topographical maps - our topos only go down to 1:50000, would love to have 1:24000 like in the article or the British 1:25000 "Explorer" maps.

I've also used Google Earth for similar reasons - taking screenshots of the hillside I'm hunting from different angles, and the sun simulator in it is very helpful as well when planning a hunt on a cold morning. Being able to simulate what areas get the sun first at sunrise helps predict where the animals will be.

I've found OsmAnd (app version of open street maps) to be pretty darn good. Especially when traveling and needing an offline maps.

Don't treat it like Google Maps were you can mistype an address and Google will return what you expected.

What is even more underrated is mapy.cz, and select the "outdoor" layer. The Czechs are crazy for outdoor activities and they have the best maps online IMHO.

Are you in the US? I use OnX maps for hunting. It's got hybrid topo + satellite and a variety of tools for e.g. dropping pins, measuring distances, measuring areas, recording your trail. It also has private land ownership information at a very detailed level (if I zoom in on my house, I see my name marked on the lot).

Afraid not, I'm a New Zealander, but I have just purchased a similar app for here - although it doesn't show land boundaries, but that's generally not a problem as I only really hunt on conservation (government) land well away from private land.

Hiker/backpacker here. If you're doing anything more than a short walk in a city park, don't use Google Maps. Upgrade to either AllTrails or Gaia GPS and pay the subscription fee that allows you to download offline maps. (I use both.) Without going into a full review of each, I'll just say that I wouldn't dream of doing any kind of hike without them. The difference between Google Maps and a dedicated mapping app is like the difference between, say, Notepad and VSCode.

Or use https://www.backcountrynavigator.com/.

All trails is constantly trying to mine data off the mobile device to facebook and other analytics services. I have premium membership and I will only use their website.

Forget Google, what you need is OpenStreetMap and that, naturally, has many offline viewers. I like Osmand and Maps.me.

It's highly variable and depends on region but I've found that particularly when it comes to hiking trails, OpenStreetMap blows Google Maps out of the water. In my area there are tons of little paths in the forests that are on OSM and none of the other mainstream mapping services.

On Android, OSMAnd is really good and there's also Maps.me. There are open-source versions of both on F-Droid as well.

I don't even bother using google maps for european alps, only for car navigation (online). Its vastly superior, so many hiking trails and other interesting things (like abandoned buildings/temporary sheds) are well documented, and usually pretty accurate. I've done tons of hikes to places I've never visited before, met nobody and just planned whole trip based in presence of those trails. Not a single disappointment.

Personally I use View Ranger on Android which is free and uses OSM maps. I 'preload' it offline by just looking at the whole area online (maybe there is some preload of a block/circle but I've never needed that, its default cache is enough for even 2 week hiking). I don't even bother with GPX trails, just follow the visible trails and decide on spot.

> On Android, OSMAnd is really good and there's also Maps.me.

Imo if you're a outdoor user on Android you should try out Locus Maps. I've used them with the downloads from openandromaps. Imo no other program comes close in terms of capabilities.

Thanks for the tip! Just looked at OsmAnd for Yosemite and it's definitely much more useful than Google Maps.

I've been an avid backpacker for about 20 years now, and my go to for paper maps has always been USGS 7.5 minute quadrangles. As the article mentions, they are the "gold standard" for many.

Recently I've had some fun playing around with making my own in https://inkatlas.com/ which is a great idea and hope it stays viable for the creator.

Inkatlas looks cool, and they're from Estonia and use OSM data. The Estonian community is small but there are some very talented mappers there. Thanks for sharing, I didn't know of Inkatlas yet!

Their online store is, sadly, paleolithic. I tried to get some for a Grand Canyon trip, and it should be noted that when they say it might be 3 weeks before the maps are printed, they mean it. And if you call to check on the order, you're likely to find that it's been thrown over the wall to the printing department and nobody who answers the phone can answer a question. And if you'd like to cancel the order, it's too late because it's been thrown over the wall.

Great maps, lousy customer service, unfortunately :-(

For my Boy Scout troop’s bigger hikes, we would download the PDFs, mark our trails with highlighters in Preview, then print and laminate them to circumvent this issue. Some of the maps are still good to use today, a decade later.

Caveat that I have no idea if this is/was legal, but there’s ways to get physical copies of the maps without dealing with the bureaucracy :).

Mounting maps. When I was in the Boy Scouts we learned to mount USGS maps on cloth.

I found a blog post which describes the process.

When I was in the Scouts, we would visit the USGS office in Palo Alto, CA to buy topo maps. Visit the USGS site to see if there is a location near you.[2]

[1]: http://www.mrgus.net/2017/02/maps-for-going-afield.html [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/connect/locations

Super fascinating, I'm going to try this out. Thank you for sharing!

Where we were hiking, it was unfortunately raining non-stop for a couple of days, and the laminated plastic made a big difference.

But you can always read the map under covers or something, as long as it's transported in a watertight bag, I think the cloth solution might last longer than ours did (plastic forms creases).

You can buy the quads at one of the stores in the park

At the time, one could not. Nor could one buy the quads at REI in Vegas, nor in any of the stores I called in Flagstaff. I was surprised by this, believe me.

Interesting. I didn't know about Ink Atlas. Thanks.

I primarily use https://mytopo.com/.

As a regular backpacker, I've been pretty happy using my phone as a primary source and paper maps as backup. On my phone, if you use the right settings (aggressive battery saver, airplane mode), turning GPS on only when checking location, and turning it off at night, I can get a solid week of battery life. (A backup battery pack does not weigh much.) Clearly, I'm not using it for much else than reading a bit before bed and taking many pictures.

If you go this route, practice using whatever app you're using in off-line mode to verify your map cache data!!!

That being said, definitely practice with paper maps and maintaining a sense of direction. This sounds easy but in an emergency situation this can be a weak link. Nothing sucks more than hiking down the wrong trail for a couple hours when you're racing against sunset. I've also been in many canyons and valleys with screwy GPS and heading readings so it's good to be able to recognize when that tool is going awry.

As far as apps, I mainly use the original Backcountry Navigator. Not the prettiest but it's been solid for me and the author was responsive back in the day when I messaged them.

For multi-hour and day hikes I usually use the combination of maps.me, park pamphlet, and photos of large posters near the trailhead. Works reasonably well, although I realize that may not work in a multi-day backcountry, mainly due to the battery and reliability issues. Haven’t done those in a while but that totally would be a trip where I would pack ye olde compass, paper map, additional external phone battery and would check phone or GPS only once in a while to make sure I am not off route.

I'm confused why en.mapy.cz is not more popular. It's literally 10x better for hiking use cases, at least in Czechia (which uses a different data source than OSM).

This is the same location on Google Maps and Mapy.cz, the difference is just ridiculous (I use 80% zoom on mapy.cz): https://imgur.com/a/Q3mlN5j

https://en.mapy.cz/turisticka?x=13.8942909&y=50.0343394&z=14...

It looks like Mapy.cz does use Open Street Map, judging by the copyright in the bottom left of your link.

It uses OSM outside of Czechia.

You may find freemap.sk even more useful: https://www.freemap.sk/?map=14/50.034339/13.894291&layers=X

This is an interesting article, and it makes me realise how lucky I am in the UK with Ordnance Survey maps.

There are Explorer maps (1:25000 scale) and Ranger maps (1:50000 scale) and they are well designed with a huge amount of detail.

Maybe stupid question, but doesn't most (western) countries have the equivalent of Ordnance Survey Maps, i.e. government produced decent quality public map set?

I don't know about a general survey of (western) countries, but I would guess yes.

As one datapoint, the Netherlands indeed has this: PDOK[1] is a cooperation between the agency that collects building/plot plans (Kadaster), ministry of internal affairs, ministry of economics and climate, the Directorate-General for Public Works and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat), and some non-profit called Geonovum. Very few people know of it aside from openstreetmap contributors, since we can get some data from there (not all of it is license-compatible, but things like addresses and buildings are imported), but it's quite comprehensive and has interesting maps like noise levels alongside major roads.

The EU has the INSPIRE project[2], though it's not exactly a map so much as a link to various maps of the member states and agreeing on some common standard to make sure they work when combined.

[1] https://pdok.nl (Dutch)

[2] https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/

“Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the OS 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed.”

— Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1997)

USGS maps are the US equivalent and slightly more detailed than he indicates:

https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=38.79182,-105.01797&z=11&b=t...

(That's a tile map, but they were originally available on paper, as described at the linked story)

As usual with Bryson he turns to hyperbole to make a point. The USGS maps are pretty good

They do, but (like OS Maps) many are only updated once every few decades. Which means that they're great for physical features, but lacking when it comes to man made features like paths, bridges, wind shelters etc.

A secondary problem is licensing. Not all mapping agencies allow you to freely or easily download their maps onto a phone or provide enough metadata to allow you to do things like routing etc.

Ordnance Survey maps are fairly well done (as good as other sovereign efforts), but the UK's approach to map licensing has probably hurt the country economically and heavily limited distribution of OS maps. OS is maybe the most antiquated map licensing agency I've ever tried to work with.

In the US, you can get the USGS maps for free. In Switzerland or France, you can get SwissTopo or France IGN in a manageable way for reasonable licensing fees. In Australia, it's a little complex, but you can go province by province and license the maps, sometimes for free. Many, many countries provide high quality maps for free or reasonable fees.

But Ordnance Survey's maps are incredibly expensive to license, hard to administer/govern, and can't be purchased for much less (if less at all) than OS charges in their own (terrible) app. And thus aren't in my app like so many others are.

The US approach to making USGS maps public domain has created enormous economic growth. This is a nice paper on the economics of maps: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.34.1.196

Thanks for your work on Gaia! I’ve been a happy premium user for almost a year now. The US public land maps are invaluable, especially in times like these.

Edit: Just saw your post about bringing Gaia to CarPlay. That’s something I’d always wanted but my car no longer supports it. Bummer. Nice work though!

Edit again: Any chance of getting cellular coverage layers?

Thanks! I made a policy to stop commenting on our roadmap, but I know someone internally is tinkering with a cellular coverage layer and it might get shipped someday ;)

This is all true but it's worth bearing in mind that OS recently made a lot of its mapping data open: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-government/tools-s....

If you ask me it's probably because their expensive licencing was causing businesses to switch to open alternatives like OSM where possible. My company is generally working towards the latter for this reason as well as the fact that it's a global dataset.

For hiking I really like Harvey's British Mountain Maps. The 1:40,000 scale gives usefully more detail than the OS Ranger maps but not as unwieldy as the Explorer maps. They're printed on vinyl so waterproof but much lighter weight than the laminated OS maps.

https://www.harveymaps.co.uk/acatalog/British-Mountain-Map-S...

As is typical in the US, the government funded mapping has had its funding slashed over the last 40 years, with private extraction companies (mining, oil, etc) making proprietary maps of their areas of interest. Works out better for the wealthy private sector and for their regulators too. The public interest, however, has been ignored.

I’m with the author: I only carry paper maps on through hikes. Batteries are heavy and peering into a small device gives you no real conception of what Where you are or what’s ahead.

Mr Skurka is a legendary solo long distance hiker in Colorado. He once did the Pacific Crest Trail plus Continental Divide Trail on the same trip.

The “Great Western Loop”: he hiked 6875 miles in 208 days.

https://andrewskurka.com/adventures/great-western-loop/

Here's my and Andrew on a guided backpacking trip. I'm the guy that has the upper body.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsG1T0_lwpl/

I've dreamed of an eink backcountry map. Ideally it would be a quad fold with a stilus, but a commercial e reader would work if it had the right software.

Hobby eink displays are a little too expensive for me to buy to experiment with.

One issue with both digital and printed maps are missing details. I went on a scout hike in the Adirondacks last summer with an experienced guide whose day job was an instructor with the U.S. Army Mountain Warfare School. We had good printed topographical maps of the areas to the south of Tupper Lake in St. Lawrence county, and on rare occasions could get a one or two bars for phone maps.

However, on one 20-mile segment, we were really thrown off by unmarked and unmapped roads peeling off through the forest from mapped roads, created by logging companies and private landowners. In one case one of those unmarked roads proved to be a time-saving shortcut when we got lost, but at other times we had to backtrack when we realized we had taken the wrong branch.

The other really helpful map we encountered were marked snowmobile trails. Snowmobilers in rural parts of the state are very well organized, and have created a network of trails stretching from western NY to the Adirondacks in the northeast part of the state. Besides trail markers, they have erected trail maps at intersections showing trails at the county level, which were very helpful.

OpenStreetMap is generally very good at this, have you looked at whether the unmapped roads are already in there? Or do you remember the location, like, coordinates? As a contributor to the project I'm curious to take a look. (Though in the USA, OSM doesn't seem to be catching on as much as in the rest of the world; if you're doing stuff with the USA Army I guess odds are good that it's on continental USA and may not be in there either.)

Edit: for what it's worth, Adirondacks is known as a camp site (last edited 22 hours ago; mapped 10 months ago) https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/6540365056

By Adirondacks I think GP means the whole mountain range, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adirondack_Mountains . Would be curious though to know whether OSM has those roads.

As they say, the map is not the territory

USGS topo maps are often out of date, lacking trails or including long-vanished trails. Some still have data from 1972. The compass fiducial can be years out of date as well.

Still, they remain the gold standard and their actual geographic info (peaks and such) remains great except in some earthquake-prone areas.

Fun fact: the best and most recent navigational charts for some islands in the Pacific Ocean were made by Captain Cook in the late 1700’s.

Best thing I learned all week!

I apologize if I'm duplicating info here because I didn't read TFA or all the comments, but the resources I've use are the offline maps in Backcountry Navigator (paid), ViewRanger (free), AllTrails (paid), Maps.me (free, no topo info, but a surprising amount of trails). If bought custom waterproof maps from mytopo.com and I've downloaded maps US topo maps from https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/ and then had them printed at Office Depot (at a readable size, but not on waterproof paper). Having multiple sources of truth helps, and also I've had glitches downloading maps offline that I didn't discover until I was on the trail, so the offline maps of apps back up each other. And also I've used Guthook for the PCT, which is wonderful.

I'll add that I carry an extra battery anyway to power not just my phone but my Kindle and my Garmin Inreach Mini.

I use a combination of paper maps and an overview map on paper. For trails like Annapurna circuit or Everest Base Camp, the paper leaflets are quite helpful as they help you plan the hike by days. However, I prefer the digital maps, specially OSM because the sheer amount of information they contain, and I can contribute too. Not every shelter has running water, hot water, electricity, etc. Not many maps indicate them either. But OSM is full of these small yet helpful information.

What is your workflow to use OSM? With an app, or do you prepare a map specifically? A special device? Thanks!

On an iphone, I can't recommend https://mapout.app/ enough. It's simple & good-looking, it's easy to download tiles of the area you need (not countries) while on wifi, but designed to work mostly offline. It's a few dollars up front & then zero nagging.

Friend on Android like OsmAnd, which sounds like a much bigger app, contours are an add-on IIRC. I think can even do things like editing the map & submitting your corrections.

I have never got around to printing maps, but have occasionally carried paper maps too. OSM is not as detailed as the best EU country maps, but is far better than anything on paper in most faraway mountain ranges.

I use maps.me, and there are several user-contributed walking trails. For unmarked trails, I draw a few trails using Google Earth Pro, and export it to maps.me, which will then draw the waypoints and trail on the map. There are communities like GPSies that share similar trails as downloadable KML files.

I use an Android phone with 6" screen + 5,000 mAh battery, accompanied with a 20,000 mAh power bank. With music playback for 7-8 hours, and occasional maps use, it's good enough to last 5-6 days in airplane mode.

"If I lose my paper maps or get way off route—both have happened—digital maps become invaluable."

That's a weird flex to make "digital" maps look better. I suppose that's a nod to have both (I agree), but it's also being "p.c.". Bring a paper map for more than a day trip. It's better in all respects that matter.

There's a great collection of topographic maps available here (not my website): https://dzjow.com/2012/04/12/free-online-topographic-maps-fo...

Here's something on the next level:

https://thingstolucat.com/category/trip-planning/

Skurka is obviously is one of the great ones. But so is Luc and he extends quite a bit on the subject.

I print topo maps onto tearproof paper. I used to use https://mappingsupport.com but haven't found an alternative since it closed down.

Caltopo.com should be a good replacement?

How do you manage to get the scaling exactly correct? I print maps onto waterproof paper from an app, but the scale is never quite right, which makes them hard to use.

try taking a screenshot image and work with that instead

I mean when you send it to your printer, how do you get the grid squares to be exactly 40x40 mm, or whatever, so you can use roamers and other tools on the map?

Oh, I understand. Not sure!

Is the map machine at the REI flagship store in Seattle still there? That's what I used to use.

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