Routes And Maps

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.

Files without elevation

Some files carry no elevation data at all: downloads from Waymarked Trails, lines drawn in Google My Maps (which writes every elevation as 0), plenty of park websites' tracks. Without elevation a route has no climb figures and no elevation profile. On Pro, Pack Hiker asks as you upload whether to add elevation. Say yes and it estimates the elevation of the ground along the line, about every 30 m, and writes it into the file itself, so it comes with the file when you download it too. A file that already has elevation data is never changed.

A route already in the hike without elevation (uploaded before this was offered, on the free plan, or when you chose to go without) can have it added later, also on Pro: open it in Route Details and choose Add elevation, in the place its elevation profile would be. The route and its file both get it, its climb is worked out, and nothing else changes: its distance, its days on the itinerary and any sections you've split it into in the Section Planner all stay as they were, with each section's climb updated to match.

Each point takes its elevation from the first of these that covers it:

1. New Zealand: LINZ's national LiDAR, a laser survey of the ground from the air. It covers most of the country; the main gaps are Fiordland's national park and Rakiura.
2. Australia: Geoscience Australia's LiDAR, which covers the coast, the Murray–Darling floodplains and the towns, about 3% of the country.
3. Rest of the world, and gaps in the AUS/NZ LiDAR: Copernicus, a satellite radar survey of the whole world.

LiDAR measures the ground itself, under the trees. The satellite data follows open ground closely, but through forest it can read high, because it measures the treetops, so a day in the trees can show more climb than the trail really has. Treat those figures as a guide. The same data, in the same order, gives elevation to every leg of a route you draw yourself, whether it snaps to a trail or is a straight line. About elevation data, at the foot of your Routes page, has a map of where the LiDAR is.

Elevation data credits:

• New Zealand: elevation adapted from the New Zealand LiDAR 1m DEM, sourced from the LINZ Data Service and licensed by Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand for re-use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
• Australia: elevation adapted from the Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of Australia derived from LiDAR 5 Metre Grid, © Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) 2015, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.
• Elsewhere: produced using Copernicus WorldDEM-30 (and, in the few places it doesn't cover, WorldDEM-90) © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018 provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA; all rights reserved. The organisations in charge of the Copernicus programme by law or by delegation do not incur any liability for any use of the Copernicus WorldDEM-30 or WorldDEM-90.

No file to upload? On Pro, draw the route yourself, with each leg following the trail, in Your Routes, then use From your routes here to add it. That's also the place to import a file you'd like to edit first.

Replacing A Route

Got a better version of a route that's already in the hike? Say the park has published an updated track, or you've downloaded someone's route, edited it in Your Routes and want yours in its place. Open the route in Route Details and choose Replace, then pick one of your routes or a file. The new line goes in where the old one was:

• it stays on the same itinerary days, in the same place in the list;
• a waypoint that hasn't moved keeps anything linked to it, like a food drop or a camp;
• its distance, climb, elevation profile and waypoints become the new route's.

Replacing with one of your routes gives it your route's name, and its start, end and colour where you've set them. It becomes a copy of your route, so when you change your route you can update it in the hike too. Replacing with a file keeps the name, start, end and colour the route already has here, since a file's own name is often just an export's. A file with several routes asks which one to use.

Anyone who can edit the hike can replace any of its routes: the same people who could delete it and add another. The hike's activity log records who did. A route that's been split into sections in the Section Planner can't be replaced, because its sections were cut from its current line. Delete it and add the new one instead.

Tip: When two routes in a hike share a name, the date each was added shows beside it: in Route Details, on the itinerary and in the Overview map's legend. That's how you tell the two apart.

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). While you're within 200 m of a route, the elevation profile under the map marks the same spot with a blue line, so you can see the climb still ahead.
• Topo / Street / 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, and the pins and travel legs start hidden there so each day's walk is easy to read; 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.