When I wrote about why I built Pack Hiker, one of the headaches was getting a proposed route in front of the whole group when not everyone has a navigation app, or the subscription it wants. Pack Hiker fixed the sharing half: upload a GPX file and everyone on the hike sees the same line on the same map.
The route itself still had to come from somewhere else. Draw it in another app, export it, upload it, and do the whole dance again every time the plan changed.
Not any more. You can now draw routes in Pack Hiker itself.
Click, and it follows the trail
Find your start on the map and click it. Then click where you're heading, and the leg in between follows the nearest walking track or road, taking the most sensible path it can find for someone on foot. Keep clicking, and the distance, ascent and descent add up underneath as you go, with an elevation profile you can colour by steepness.
You don't have to click exactly on the track. Anywhere within about 500 m of it snaps onto it, and a point is all it takes to send the route a particular way.
Heading off-track? Switch Snap to trails off and legs are drawn as straight lines until you switch it back on, so one route can mix a formed track, a beach and a cross-country ridge.
Changing your mind is easy. Drag any point and the legs either side of it are worked out again, tap a leg to add a point or switch it between straight and snapped, and Undo as many times as you need. Reverse walks the whole thing the other way.
The trails come from OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-built map of the world, so snapping works anywhere in the world a track has been mapped.
Waypoints, names and colours
A line on a map only tells half the story. Mark what's worth knowing along the way: water, campsites, huts, a lookout, a tricky river crossing. There are the same twenty waypoint types a hike's map uses, and each can carry notes, like how reliable the tank is or how far the hut sits off the track.
You can also name the start and end points and give the route a colour. The waypoints go into the route's GPX, and all of it goes with the route into any hike you add it to.
Your own route library
Every route you save lives in Routes, your own library that sits outside any hike. Each one is drawn over satellite imagery so you can recognise it at a glance, or switch to a slim list once you've got more than a handful.
Already have routes elsewhere? Import a GPX, KML or GeoJSON file: an export from Gaia, AllTrails, Caltopo, a park website or most mapping apps. The track is kept exactly as it is, its waypoints come with it, and it opens in the editor ready to change like a route you drew. A file with several routes in it (one track per day, say) can come in as separate routes or joined into one.
Going the other way, any route downloads as a GPX, waypoints included, for your GPS or navigation app.
And nothing is lost if you close the page halfway through: until you save, your changes are kept in that browser and come back when you return.
Adding a route to a hike
Choose Add to a hike on a saved route, or From your routes inside a hike, and the hike gets its own copy. From then on it's a route like any other in the hike: on the map, in the itinerary, in the elevation profiles, the PDF and the safety brief, with its waypoints on the hike's map straight away.
It's a copy on purpose. The plan the whole group is looking at shouldn't shift underneath them because someone tinkered with their own route at midnight, and a hike should never depend on one member's account still existing.
So when you do change a route, Pack Hiker tells you which of your hikes have an older copy and offers to update it, when you're ready. The update goes in where the old copy was: it stays on the same itinerary days, and a waypoint that hasn't moved keeps anything linked to it, like a food drop or a camp.
And if you've got a better version of a route that's already in a hike, any route there can now be replaced in place, from Route Details, keeping its spot in the itinerary.
Private by default
- Your library is yours alone. No other Pack Hiker user can see it, not even the people on the hikes you've added routes to. They see the hike's copy, like any route file.
- The routing runs on Pack Hiker's own server. The points you click are never sent to an outside routing service, and they're kept out of the server's logs. A planned route says where somebody is going to be, and that should stay between you and your group.
- Deleting your account deletes your routes. Copies you've added to hikes stay with those hikes, like your other contributions to them.
On your phone
The editor works on a phone too: tap to add points, and press and drag to move one. In the Android app, routes arrive with version 2.42, which the app's update banner will offer you.
Snapping and saving need a internet connection. Without one, new legs are drawn straight, and they snap by themselves once you're back online.
Where to find it
Open Routes from the tabs at the top of your dashboard, or Your routes in the profile menu, then choose Draw a route or Import. The Help Centre has the details in Your Routes and Drawing And Editing Routes.
If a leg takes a strange way round, add a point to steer it, or draw that stretch straight. If a track you know is missing altogether, it's probably not in OpenStreetMap yet. Anyone can add it there, and it will reach Pack Hiker when I next update the trail data. And if something is confusing, broken or missing, I'd genuinely like to hear about it at adam@packhiker.com.
Happy hiking.
-Adam