Learn about online mapping and route planning tools such as Hiking Project, Gaia, AllTrails, and CalTopo, which you can use as a supplement to (or a substitute for) guidebooks and paper maps.
As with the analog versions, you can use digital planning tools to survey for potential campsites and water sources, but you can also estimate accurate distances and elevation changes for each leg of your trip, which paper maps don’t always do a great job at. We’ll briefly talk about GPS technology, GPS smartphone apps, and getting routes designed with the online tools into your phone or standalone GPS, sure. But we’ll also discuss how to generate plain old printed paper maps from your routes using CalTopo, because all that fancy tech will fail you at some point.
Finally, by request, we’ll end by creating an example Friday-Sunday trip to a choice backpacking spot within a few hundred miles of Cincinnati, using REI’s Hiking Project and CalTopo.
This event is part of our Virtual Outings series!
Presented by Kevin Ernst.
