Pick your units once
Pack Hiker can show every measurement in metric (kilometres, metres, kilograms, litres) or imperial (miles, feet, pounds, US quarts). Set it in the user menu → Your profile → Units.
There are three presets:
| Preset | Distance | Elevation | Weight and water |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metric | kilometres | metres | kilograms · litres |
| Imperial (US) | miles | feet | pounds · quarts |
| UK | miles | metres | kilograms · litres |
If none of those is quite right, Set each unit separately lets you mix them however you like — miles with kilograms, kilometres with pounds, whatever matches how you think.
Why the UK gets its own preset
Because the UK genuinely mixes the two, and it isn't a mistake.
Road signs and everyday conversation are in miles. But Ordnance Survey maps — what almost every British hillwalker actually navigates from — are fully metric: one kilometre grid squares, contours and summit heights in metres. "A nine mile walk with 750 m of ascent" is completely normal British hillwalking speech.
So the UK preset gives you miles for distance and metres for elevation. If you'd rather have feet, switch just that one setting.
Ireland is not on the UK preset — it has used kilometres on road signs since 2005, so it defaults to metric like the rest of Europe.
We try to guess, and you can always overrule us
When you sign up, Pack Hiker guesses from your device's time zone — a device set to US Eastern gets imperial, one set to London gets the UK preset, everywhere else gets metric.
Time zone is a better guess than your device's language, because a great many phones and laptops outside the US ship with US English as their default language. Your clock setting tracks where you actually are.
It's still only a guess. Whatever you pick in Profile wins from then on, and signing in from a borrowed laptop in another country will never change it. If your device looks like it's somewhere else, the Units setting offers you a one-click switch.
What changes, and what doesn't
Your choice applies to everything you read:
- route distance, ascent and descent
- elevation profiles, including their axes
- the measuring dots along a route on the map (every 1 km, or every 1 mile) and the map's scale bar
- backpack weight, food weights and water
- the exported PDF, which uses the units of whoever exported it
It also applies to everything you type. Enter your base backpack weight in pounds and it stays in pounds; enter a food item in ounces and that's what you'll see.
Your pack mates keep their own choice
Units are a personal display setting, not a property of the hike. Under the surface every measurement is stored one single way for everybody, and converted only when it's put on screen.
That means an American who joins an Australian's hike sees miles and pounds while the organiser sees kilometres and kilograms — same trip, same numbers, each of you reading them the way you think. Nobody has to convert anything in their head, and nobody can change what anyone else sees.
Currency is the exception, and deliberately so: money is set per hike, on the hike itself, because everyone has to settle up in the same currency.
A note on rounding
Because everything is stored one way and converted for display, a figure someone else entered may show a slightly untidy number to you — a 2 quart water suggestion from a US-based trip planner reads as 1.9 L. That's not an error: it's the real amount, shown honestly rather than quietly rounded into something it isn't.