There is a huge world to explore in the great outdoors, but finding the best trails to trek, hike or mountain bike is often harder than it should be. The app capabilities of the iPhone, however, make it the ideal tool for finding even the most obscure trails. That’s why these ten topography and hiking apps were created; drawing from the combined experience and skills of the greatest outdoors enthusiasts, parks organizations and apps developers.
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- Point De Vue – You can download maps from anywhere in the world, take your hiking to new elevations and list all available summits nearby. Point De Vue costs $1.99 from the iTunes store, which is a small price to pay for an app that works offline. If you have a summit in mind for a future hike, this app allows you to plan your trek from the comfort of your home, too.
- Everytrail Pro – Packed with over 400,000 trips that have been recorded by other travelers, Everytrail Pro is the definitive guide to everything, including hiking, trekking, sailing and water-skiing. You can even listen to audio guides, leaving your hands free for more immediate tasks, like ascending a steep summit. You can also download thousands of maps and routes, as well as keep track of data such as speed, distant and elevation.
- Alltrails Hiking and Mountain Biking – For the more experienced hiker, Alltrails is an app that helps you find new trails that you have yet to explore. While you won’t get a route for the trails, this free app is great for expanding your hiking location options. Although this app is quite simple, it does have some other useful features, including reviews, ratings and distance and elevation for each route.
- MapMyHike GPS Hiking – One of the best features included with this free app is the GPS hiking-party tracker. You can instantly find the location and distance of any member in your hiking party, ensuring that no one gets separated from the group. There are also millions of downloadable hikes available from the MapMyHike.com database.
- Trails – There are over 48,000 trails available from this app, which are ideal for hiking, biking and other outdoor activities. Trails also supplies critical information when you need it, such as weather conditions, elevation and sunrise and sunset times for your location. A map is included for each trail, which includes marker icons for specific activities and landmarks. Trails is free and available for download from the iTunes store.
- Oh Ranger! – This virtual guide to the outdoors is free to download from the iTunes store. You can find routes through National Parks, National Forests and all other federally-managed Recreation Destinations in the United States using Oh Ranger. The app lists all activities and hiking routes for each location, of which there are over 50,000 available to view at any time.
- Outdoors World Topo Maps – Outdoors map downloads, as well as membership of outdoorsgps.com, is free of charge. The app allows you to download and store an unlimited number of maps on your phone, making Outdoors maps ideal for offline hiking and trekking. You can track your progress and navigate in the usual ways, with compass, altimeter and distance features. Once you have completed your hike, share it with the world by uploading to Outdoor’s Facebook and Twitter pages.
- Trimbles Outdoors Navigator – The map types available with this app are streets, hybrid, aerial, topo and terrain. Trimble Outdoors Navigator is primarily a navigator app, which records routes and treks using GPS; however, with more than 68,000 topo maps available to download for offline use, this $4.99 app is well worth the money spent. You can create a journal of your trip using geo-tagged images, audio and videos, too.
- Mapster – As far as free map and hiking apps go, you won’t get more accurate topographical data. You can download maps of any location in the world, which are so intricate in their detail that you will find hiking treks that are not even documented in official guides. This feature alone means you will always have access to the closest, undiscovered trails to your location; however, there are also markers for any established trails, too.
- Topo2Go Free – This simple, free app allows you to download any number of topographic maps for offline use with your iPhone. Maps are arranged in order of distance from your current location, making it easy to instantly access the maps for the area closest to you. Topo2Go uses free maps from TopoQuest, however, you can direct the app to other sites to download maps, too.
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