Routes are the backbone of the plan. Upload the track once and it flows everywhere — the Overview map, the itinerary, the elevation profiles, the PDF export and the safety brief.
Uploading A Route
On the Overview tab, upload a GPX, KML or GeoJSON file — exports from Gaia, AllTrails, Caltopo, park websites and most mapping apps all work. Pack Hiker parses the track, computes distance, ascent and descent, and draws it on the map in its own colour (pick one, or let the palette choose).
If the file contains several routes (say, a folder export with one track per day), you'll be asked how to import it: keep it as one combined route, or split it into separate routes — and you can tick exactly which ones to bring in. Each selected route can be given its own start and end point names right there in the chooser; combine them instead and the first route's start and the last route's end carry over. Files with very many tracks are best imported combined and then divided with the Section Planner.
Tip: You can re-download the original file any time from the route's menu — handy for loading it onto your GPS or phone nav app.
Distance, Ascent And Descent
Raw GPS tracks are noisy, and naive maths badly over-counts climb. Pack Hiker filters elevation the way dedicated hiking apps do, so ascent/descent figures are realistic and comparable with what your mapping app reports. Stats appear per route, per section and per itinerary day.
Elevation Profiles And Steepness
Distances and elevations are shown in whichever units you picked in your profile — kilometres and metres, or miles and feet. See Miles Or Kilometres.
Every route has an elevation profile. Toggle the steepness heat map to colour the profile by grade — five colour-blind-safe bands from easy cruising to very steep — so you can spot the brutal climbs before they spot you. The toggle sticks across every profile in the app, so turn it on once and it stays on.
Pro feature. The steepness heat map needs a Pro account. During the beta every account is Pro, so it's on for everyone right now.
Waypoints That Come With Your File
Most route files carry waypoints as well as a track — water sources, campsites, huts, lookouts. Pack Hiker reads them on upload, but it doesn't put them on the map until you say which are which.
That's because there is no standard for waypoint symbols. The GPX format leaves the
label up to whichever app or GPS wrote the file, so the same drinking tap might be
water-24 from one app, Drinking Water from another, and a 💧 emoji from a third.
Roughly half the symbols a typical file uses have no Pack Hiker equivalent at all, and
showing every one of them would bury your route under identical pins.
The waypoint manager
Open it with the Waypoints button at the top of Route Details. It lists every symbol found across all your route files, with a count, a suggested Pack Hiker type, and a tick for whether it goes on the map:
- Symbols we recognise arrive already matched and ticked — usually you can just save.
- Symbols we don't arrive as POI and unticked. Pick a type from the dropdown and tick it if you want it shown.
- The tick is per symbol, so one decision covers all twelve of that kind at once.
Your choices are remembered per hike. Upload another route later and only genuinely new symbols come up for a decision — anything you've already mapped simply appears. Delete a route and re-upload it and the mapping is still there.
There are twenty waypoint types: POI, Trailhead, Parking, Transport, Summit, Viewpoint, Crossing, Junction, Gate, Hazard, Building, Accommodation, Restaurant, Toilet, Shower, Reception, Tent, Hut, Water and Food drop.
Turning a waypoint into something real
A waypoint is just a marker. Hover one to read its name; click it and the pin grows, the name slides out beside it, and a menu unfolds underneath with the description from the original file, how far along the route it sits, and everything it can become:
- Point of interest, Activity, Accommodation or Tent or hut — an entry on the itinerary
- Water source — with a tap / tank / natural type
- Food drop — a real drop you can tag meals to
- Mobile reception — with a signal percentage
Any waypoint can become any of these; the file's own labelling doesn't restrict you. If you already have something suitable that isn't spoken for — a POI, a camp, a drop — the menu offers to link that instead of creating another, and moves it to the waypoint's exact position. Anything already linked to another waypoint is left out of that list: one record stands for one waypoint.
Once a waypoint stands for something, its marker takes on that thing's icon with a tinted background (a food drop's tint follows the drop's own colour), so linked pins are easy to pick out. Use Unlink on one to undo it, or Remove on a plain waypoint to hide just that marker — re-tick its symbol in the manager to bring it back.
Adding your own waypoints
Click any empty part of the map and choose Add waypoint to drop your own pin with a name, a description and a type. It shows on the map straight away — there's no symbol to map, since you picked the type yourself — and it can be converted into a camp, water source, food drop or itinerary entry later, exactly like one from a file.
Note: Waypoints are read once, when a file is uploaded. If a route was uploaded before this feature existed, re-upload the file to pick up its waypoints.
Files with only waypoints
A file containing waypoints and no track is fine — it's tagged Waypoints only and shows a waypoint count instead of distance. It has no elevation profile and can't be added to an itinerary day, since there's no route to walk; its waypoints work exactly as above.
Water, Reception And Click-To-Place
Beyond routes, the hike map holds shared points of interest:
- Water sources — tap, tank or natural
- Mobile reception spots — with a signal-strength percentage
Click anywhere on the map to add something at that spot: a tent or hut, a food drop, a water source, a reception point, or a plain waypoint. If the spot is near a scheduled route, Pack Hiker tells you how far along the day's walk it is and offers to put it on that day's itinerary.
Getting Around The Map
- The locate button shows your live GPS position (allow location access when asked).
- Topo / Satellite, Waypoints and Travel switch the base map and show or hide the map's pins and travel legs. On the smaller map on a hike's Overview they sit in the menu behind the cog at the top-left; full-screen maps show them as separate buttons.
- Every "View map" opens the full map — placing and editing points works there too.
- On the Android app you can download offline map areas per hike — see Using Pack Hiker offline.
Note: Pack Hiker's maps are planning tools. Carry a dedicated navigation app or paper map (and know how to use them) for on-trail navigation.