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Anyone who rides an MTB and wants to get better at reading maps, I can only recommend finding a local MTB-O group and joining them for training sessions. It helps if the area the map covers you are familiar with at least a little bit, after the session your familiarity will increase 200% (and I've been going to these MTB-O trainings for years, mainly to the same places, and still discover new trails and unknown areas!).

The basic idea of MTB-O is that you need to find points from a known starting position on a blind map. Rules are simple: you must follow existing trails, you shouldn't just cross terrain (like you would in the classic running version of orienteering). After a few sessions you will start understanding the importance of isohypses (elevation lines), because there can be significant differences in difficulty of routes, depending on your route choice. You decide your own route, then navigate, easier said than done while your heartrate is >170bpm :)

Here is a recent example of such a map, I hope it can be accesssed openly: http://astrois.hu/mtbo/2023/cstsz2023-palyak11.Hosszu.gif

You start at the triangle, then usually go in sequence of the numbering of purple circles. Black lines are the trails, dotted means worse quality / smaller, straight line means wider, brown is paved / street.

Try connecting two purple circles purely by following the black trails, there are usually multiple reasonable options, but be vary of the difference in elevation! It is really fun doing it purely in your head, even better if you know the terrain, you can close your eyes and do an imaginery run!

My wife is definitely in the cannot read a map group. It astounds me and I've given up all hope of teaching her how to read a map. Even with GPS maps in the car it's still iffy.

I know there is a stereotype about females and spatial awareness, maybe that has something to do with it but I like to think it was all my time playing video games as a kid, which often had a map in the HUD or whatnot.

I think it's just cultural exposure rather than any sort of brain difference when it comes to map reading.

As a young lad, I did lots of map and compass work in boy scouts, and then more doing backpacking with my male friends. When I started hunting with those same buddies, map reading ability was assumed and absolutely essential for survival. A typical excursion is miles from a road or trail in heavily forested mountains. For some reason, I found my female friends mostly chose other forms of mutual recreation in their youth. I knew a few though that didn't and they were just as good as my male friends.

And now as a Civil Engineer, I often make maps for sites in GPS-difficult areas (heavy tree cover). So I've gotten REALLY good at piecing things together from tiny little details in satellite photography. Like nothing replaces seeing aerial shots over and over again and comparing it to what youve seen on the ground.

The single biggest skill that GPS is killing isn't symbolic recognition in the map, it's what I call "thinking big". GPS directions are the minutia, and if you follow directions at that scale, its VERY easy to become disoriented or lost. In contrast, if you just quickly scan the larger map features (position of a big mountain, the freeway, a large park boundary, etc, you can mostly navigate without the GPS at all. I might take different streets to get to the freeway, but I'll still get there.

In open country, you can't look at the trees or trail markers as your primary guide. You'll be in danger of getting lost. The skill is rather knowing which mountain you're on, where it is relative to other mountains, and counting the large scale features like ridges, valleys/streams, and general position of roads. I don't need turn by turn directions to get to the road due south of my position and then know I can follow it back up to the truck.

> GPS directions are the minutia, and if you follow directions at that scale, its VERY easy to become disoriented or lost. In contrast, if you just quickly scan the larger map features (position of a big mountain, the freeway, a large park boundary, etc, you can mostly navigate without the GPS at all.

Yes I find that even driving, if I follow Apple or Google maps navigation I'll realize that I have no clear idea how to get back to where I started. Back in the days when I'd have to look at a paper street map and plot my own course in advance, I'd have a much better sense of where I was and how to backtrack.

> GPS directions are the minutia, and if you follow directions at that scale, its VERY easy to become disoriented or lost.

I can't bring myself to use turn by turn directions unless I can look at the overview map first. The turn by turn is useful to me to find an unfamiliar freeway exit or a turn onto a street with terrible signage. But I need to see the overall map first to prime it in my head.

I get really frustrated at online maps that don't show street names (and one-ways) at medium levels of detail. Or they'll put the street label just outside the viewport.

> I think it's just cultural exposure rather than any sort of brain difference when it comes to map reading.

I'm not convinced of this. My oldest could read a map before kindergarten. He could navigate IKEA or the zoo. My middle child is hopeless even as she heads to college. We joke about sending the (much) younger brother with her so she doesn't get lost. It's only half a joke.

I've also had my time in the military (pre-GPS) watching a wide range of people fail spectacularly at land navigation. While the very poorly educated often did poorly and had little ability to abstract, the same bad navigation skills were on display with academy graduates who presumably already had more training before I ever saw them in the field.

There is definitely something innate to reading and navigating by map in my experience.

> The single biggest skill that GPS is killing isn't symbolic recognition in the map, it's what I call "thinking big".

I agree completely. If I'm using GPS to navigate around a town, I've found looking at the route first and creating a general narrative helps. Something like "I'm traveling generally southwest. Most of my time is on I-80, and my exit is shortly after the big turn after which I'll continue west."

Yeah, even though I grew up looking at maps and even drawing them for fun on graph paper when I was a kid, it has taken me a very long time to get to the point where I can navigate by map instead of step by step directions.

Living in the Boston area for a few years in my 20s before GPS nav was readily available definitely helped, as one wrong turn might easily wind up with you being somewhere you've never been before, and the only way back is to look at a map. I had a few very dog eared pages of the same atlas that a lot of people used back then.

I've spent a lot of time on the bike and skis looking at maps in Trailforks over the last few years. That has helped as well. It's fun to spend a lot of time in the woods and start to build a sense of location based on your surroundings.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/living-wit...

When it gets really fun is when Trailforks is wrong...

I'm trying to get that fixed with a State Rec Area in northern Michigan. Trailforks was drawn, years ago, with the old/unofficial/local names of a bunch of bandit trails. Since then the state has closed a couple trails, officially recognized others, names have become standardized, and an official map has been developed.

Now Trailforks doesn't match the official map nor the on-the-ground signage. But the level of change needed is beyond what a normal user can do, and I'm struggling to get an admin to make the changes. In the mean time, when I was there a couple weeks ago I helped three separate groups that were profoundly lost because they thought they were in one place (per Trailforks) but none of the signage matched what they thought. It was the whole bad-data-is-worse-than-no-data problem.

If you want to see this for yourself, compare these two:

https://www.trailforks.com/region/harlow-lake/

https://www2.dnr.state.mi.us/publications/pdfs/RecreationCam...

I'm hoping to move to something like OrganicMaps [0], now that it supports importing GPX files.

[0] https://organicmaps.app

I use OsmAnd myself, and my main recommendation for folks is to use Gaia because it's... easier and less nerd knobby. But where OSM falls short is in tagging of mountain bike trails. Missing tags, no visualizers for contextual data like difficulty or route coloring on trail. Not to mention directionality on one-way trails, recommended (but not required) directions, the desire for showing routes on non-loop systems... etc.

Personally when navigating I use a combination of OsmAnd, TrailForks (carefully), and some sort of copy of the trail system's print map. This usually does me well.

I'm also working on a structure like this, which I hope to eventually use as an easy way to take OSM MTB trail data and present it on a slippy map, but it's still very much a casual side project / WIP: https://trailmaps.app/ramba

I have a feeling that the split is primarily between those who intuitively comprehend the maps along with those who were able to learn how to understand them against those who have never had any instructions alongside those who are utterly incapable of comprehending the maps even if given one on one instruction for a month straight....

We too often underestimate the stupidity of the common person....