By Tom Galbraith
GaiaGPS is the single best App I’ve ever purchased, and
that’s coming from a parsimonious Scots miser who
hasn’t purchased more than a dozen App’s for his smartphone, and those few all
under $3.
Let’s just get the price issue out of the way at the onset:
it costs $19 from the App Store for iOS devices and at Google Play for Android
devices. If the cost puts you off from trying this invaluable backcountry App,
then find someone who’s using it and get a first-hand demonstration, or visit
the GaiaGPS website to view a demo.
GaiaGPS has extended my hiking and
backpacking experiences many-fold since I first saw another hiker using it on
the trail. He was following a track someone had given him, recording his own
track with all the real time stats, all the while viewing his current location
on a clearly visible fully-zoomed USGS topo.
 |
| The ease of use, features, and clarity of GaiaGPS rivals any dedicated mapping GPS on the market. Maps and routes are easily loaded. On this screen I have loaded four routes and GaiaGPS shows them at the same time in different colors. With Gaia, my phone serves as a GPS, camera, notepad, and reader. |
Questions immediately came to mind: What does it cost? How
much are the topos? How large is the app? How do you get other people’s tracks?
Does it eat up your smartphone battery and what was that name again? (It’s GaiaGPS).
I’ll have to admit I had to look up “gaia” on the internet;
its The ancient Greek goddess of the
earth, mother of the Titans, in case you’re clueless as well.
I’ll also admit more than once I’ve been “off track” when
hiking and backpacking. Now with GaiaGPS on my smartphone it happens less
often, or more to the point, for not as long.
Having a real-time GPS cursor following my footsteps is a pretty amazing
feature to have in my pocket.
GaiaGPS on a smartphone doesn’t use or need cell tower
availability or coverage, rather it uses the phone’s internal GPS chip. It works anywhere in the world, unless you’re
in a deep dark canyon with walls that obscure most of the sky. My GaiaGPS recorded tracks seem to do just
fine in dense forests and wooded areas but will jump diagonally off track when
it’s bouncing off steep walls and cliffs, righting itself once it can “see”
more sky.
The phone stays in my pocket (or hip belt) until I’ve sensed
I’m off track, have an intersection choice to make, or just am curious how far
we’ve gone. But GaiaGPS can tell you
much more if you choose: such as knowing the distance, altitude, moving time
versus your total time, average speed, and stopped time, to name a few.
What really pleases me is that I now have all those GPS
features combined with a camera and phone.
I’ve eliminated my Garmin Trek’s 5.1 ounces (that I rarely used) along
with 4.75 ounces for my point-and-shoot camera and consolidated those functions
into my iPhone. The 9.85 ounce savings allows other gear, or better yet cutting
my base weight down closer to that elusive 10-pound number.
And just as preparing for an adventure is enjoyable and
rewarding, checking out my tracks and stats after the hike has added to my
overall joy of backpacking. Sharing the track is fun as well. You can export the track via email or text
message as well as import it into Google Earth or other mapping applications
like Garmin Base Camp. I often take a
screen shot of the imported Google Earth track and place it in my blog to give
folks a sense of where I’ve been hiking.
Just buying the app can be a little intimidating and even
frustrating if you don’t know how to use it to its full potential. GaiaGPS offers you all the USGS topos for the
United States
for free, as long as you are online (connected to WiFi). You must select an area (draw a box around
and Save) the region you’d like to have on your phone while you’re still
online.
The features and operation are very straight forward, but it
takes a little exploring to figure that out without someone showing you or
watching the numerous very short how-to videos offered in the Help Section of
their website.
You can certainly Record a Track without a single bit of
help and download the map tiles after-the-fact, but if you’re actually trying
to navigate with a topo offline you need to have those USGS (or other versions
of the many maps provided) loaded beforehand.
Users new to the app complain of “blurry” topos when in reality they
haven’t downloaded the actual map tiles and are just seeing the default low
resolution overview map.
There is a long list of features provided with the basic
version, but the overall beauty of the app is having a super clear, zoom-able
topo of where you are traveling and the GPS cursor arrow marking your current
location. If you’ve started recording
your track, the line of travel is shown in a contrasting color telling you
where you’ve been and possibly how far off track you might be.
I especially like loading up someone else’s track for a hike
or ride, and using that to show me the route I’m planning
to travel. That feature is as easy as
emailing yourself the previous track (from a friend or off the internet),
tapping the attachment and selecting Import to GaiaGPS. It loads in your
GaiaGPS Folders section and you can “Show on Map” with the press of a button.
After using GaiaGPS and collecting numerous tracks, I really
appreciate the easy way I can organize the various tracks into Folders, making finding
and utilizing previous tracks far easier.
This app could be something you didn’t know you needed, but
it soon will be something you can’t live without. Especially if it helps get your pack weight
down by eliminating an extra device. As
mentioned earlier, GaiaGPS has numerous short and to-the-point video tutorials (https://help.gaiagps.com/hc/en-us/categories/202519108-iOS),
in the Help section of their website online, for each feature. Check it out; you’ll like it.
About the Author:
Tom Galbraith has a long and varied outdoor history, including living on a
sailboat, mountain biking the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, ultralight
backpacking in remote beautiful places, rafting western rivers, spending
winters in Thailand, trekking in Switzerland, and hiking the Colorado Trail.
You can read about his adventures at http://www.tgsgblog.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment