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Went hiking while relying on a phone app. Offline, it cached the map no problems, until a few hours in when the TTL must have been triggered then everything disappeared. Bought a real map soon after.
Went hiking while relying on a phone app. Offline, it cached the map no problems, until a few hours in when the TTL must have been triggered then everything disappeared. Bought a real map soon after.
And also bring a waterproof paper map because it's lighter, easier to read, more resilient, and more fun.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and know how to use it ...
Fair. As someone who grew up with physical maps, using them is pretty intuitive but I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone. And, of course, some aspects of topographic maps take some education. With respect to compass, I'm not sure how critical real orienteering is for most people. It's more about not being totally turned around and/or being able to make sure you hit some feature like a road.
Even though I bring my phone with offline maps downloaded (Gaia GPS), I still like to bring a paper map of the area as well. In addition to having another option in case my phone breaks or dies, paper maps are nice to have so people can gather around and look together and build knowledge. When solo, paper maps are an easy thing to look at when sitting around the camp. Shout out to my local cartographer Bryan Conant w…
> His customers, he added, aren’t just looking to maps for directions, but as inspiration for future trips or even as art worth hanging. I think that alone accounts for the vast majority of this increase. The article throws that in as a minor detail but I'd bet money it's the only reason. Of course you don't get as many clicks for "More people are buying maps as art". 2 of the 3 examples of maps they give at the end…
This is coming from a career Army officer, so I'm quite used to looking at maps on the walls of operations centers, and doing serious map-and-compass navigation exercises.
It’s a lot of fun for me, using maps just ruins the fun of exploration.
Went hiking while relying on a phone app. Offline, it cached the map no problems, until a few hours in when the TTL must have been triggered then everything disappeared. Bought a real map soon after.
Strange... if you store a map for offline viewing in Google Maps, it will be cached for at least a few months - and when that time expires, it will ask you if you want to update it. But I can't vouch for the various hiking apps which may be better for hiking data, but have worse UX overall. Or you can use an "offline-only" app like OSMAnd and feed it with GPX tracks downloaded from hiking sites, then you only have to…
Related: this reminds me of the "paper phone" concept from Google: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/paper-phone
Obviously they can't be too young and they're not going to be perfect, but if you have a child around 7-13 they'll probably find this quite fun.
Being able to use a map is one of those skills which admittedly isn't all that useful today, but I still think it's fun to plan out your own routes and decide the kinds of roads you'd like to take and the places you'd like to pass on your way from A to B. Plus, there are so many times my phone has died or my GPS has randomly stopped working and I'm glad I have my paper map with me just in case.