[pct-l] Questions about Halfmile's smartphone app

[Herb Stroh]

I will second the recommendation of Gaia. Download the track/route, click a button and all the relevant maps download to your phone. Obviously this is best done where you have a good wifi connection. Note that Gaia costs $20.

I used it in the Sierra this summer and was really impressed. To save battery life I put it into airplane mode (I have Verizon), and just toggled it "on" when I wanted to check my position. 

Gaia also has some nice tracking features. I find it to be far more powerful and user-friendly than my expensive GPS units gathering dust in a drawer. Of course with a phone you must deal with power issues and durability, but those can be addressed.

For creation of maps I highly recommend Hillmap: http://www.hillmap.com/ Very easy to create a route and then download to your phone. Printing is a bit of a struggle to set up, but works great once you get the drill. The hillmap page defaults to a split screen, allowing the user to plan the route looking at a topographic on one side and satellite imagery on the other. There are multiple map layers you can choose from. Saving maps for future tinkering and/or to share with others is easy. All that and its free. Pretty cool.

Herb