1. GAIA GPS + WorkOutDoors: I’ve tested lots of navigation apps, but Gaia GPS is by far the best hiking and backcountry nav app. It has the best and largest collection of maps, including multiple topographical options, NatGeo Trails maps, and ski and mountain biking maps. It also has a huge searchable database of hiking trails, so you can look for for hikes by difficulty and length. The $17 per year subscription lets you download maps to use offline for when you don’t have phone service, and a $40 per year subscription gives you access to maps for specific sports and more I really like Gaia because you can also load GPS tracks from other sources into it, and when you record your own tracks, it’s easy to see all of your hiking stats. I also like that it does a good job surfacing points of interest, like waterfalls or viewpoints that often aren’t highlighted on other apps’ maps. Maybe most important to me, it’s reliable and the user interface is fluid and fast. It always just works great. My only complaint is that even their improved companion Apple Watch app just isn’t very good, so I recommend pairing Gaia GPS with the WorkOutDoors Apple Watch app, which I talk about in my Apple Watch hiking video.
2. FAROUT: In terms of navigation, Gaia and WorkOutDoors have you covered, but there’s one other navigation app I want to recommend for thru-hikers. FarOut has revolutionized thru-hiking by crowdsourcing information on trail conditions, campsites, and water sources, and it has guides for many of the world’s best long through-hikes, including the Pacific Crest Trail in California, the Appalachian Trail in the eastern US, the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and the Te Araroa in New Zealand. You can always find out exactly where you are on the trail, whether a river was too high to cross this morning, and even if a town’s store owners are thru-hiker friendly. I admit that if you rely on the app too heavily, it can take away a bit of the magic of discovery, so don’t let it become your parents.
3. WINDY: Windy is a free super-precise weather app that was originally designed for wind and water sports like sailing and windsurfing, but it now has basically any weather information you could want, from extremely detailed daily forecasts, to tide charts, snowfall rates, and fishing and surf conditions. I love this app because, with the $40/year Pro version, you can browse several years of weather history AND save weather forecasts offline, so when you’re on day 4 of your hike with no phone service, you can see when the tide is going to be high and if it’s expected to thunderstorm in the afternoon. And if you’re trying to sail somewhere, the wind forecasts are the best you can get.
4. SEEK: Really the point of hiking isn’t exercise but to explore and discover the world, and my trips are always filled with questions about everything surrounding us. So now, I carry a collection of apps that helps answers all these questions, and the first is the free Seek, by iNaturalist, which answers those pesky what kind of plant or animal is that questions. The app uses amazing image recognition technology to identify practically everything you can find: animals and other wildlife, plants, and fungi. You can point your camera at any insect, bird, amphibian, plant, or flower and it’s tell you what it is. The app also works as a diary, keeping track of everything you’ve identified, which makes it easy to look back and reminisce about all the stuff you saw in the natural world on a given trip. And I recommending pairing Seek with the also-free Wild Edibles Forage app, which has a database of information about all of the edible plants in the world, which you can use Seek to help you identify.
5. PEAKVISOR: Probably the next most common question that comes up hiking is: which mountain peak is that? Well, you can get the answer with PeakVisor, which can give you a mountain’s name, elevation, prominence, mountain /range/, description, and a slew of other interesting info like huts, trails, and castles on the mountain. What’s so cool about the way PeakVisor works though is you can just point your smartphone camera at the mountains in question, and the app immediately labels the peaks before your eyes, in augmented reality. All that comes for free, but if you’re willing to pay $30/year, the app will also let you look at 3D topographical maps to help navigate your hiking routes and save them offline if you’re hiking without phone service.
6. NIGHT SKY: Before the Night Sky app, I used to gaze up in the dark in a place like Hawaii, identify Orion, and wish I knew what all those other constellations were. But now, I basically have a planetarium in my pocket. With amazing Augmented Reality technology, you can point your phone at the sky and the Night Sky app overlays labels for constellations, star systems, and planets, making it easy to know whether what you’re looking at is a satellite, planet, or a comet. You can also ask specific questions, like where is the international space station, and it will show you. Most of the features are free, but for $30/year, you get premium features like live tours of the night sky, help locating good spots to see the aurora borealis, and the ability to zoom deep into the universe and explore its 1.8 billon stars. Night Sky is only available for iPhone, and I like it’s amazing Apple Watch companion app, but there is a similar smartphone app called Star Walk for Android, that’s also very good.
7. FLYOVER COUNTRY: Another genre of hiking questions are geological and landscape-related, which is why it’s nice to have the free Flyover Country app with you. You just tap on the start and end point of your hike (or even for a cross-country flight, as the name suggests), and you can download geological maps to use offline while on your trip. You can explore descriptions of the geology, landscape features, fossils, and more. There’s a landscape feature reference so you can read about, say, how those V-shaped valleys all over Hawaii, are formed. And there’s also a cool selection of field guides, which lets you take detailed geological tours of an area, though the guides are mostly centered around the western US.
8. SAS SURVIVAL GUIDE: The likeliness of having an emergency while you’re hiking is low, but you just never know. So it’s good to have an app along that can help you will all kinds of problems, like the $6 SAS Survival Guide. It’s a book with an extensive first aid how-to section (way more than the Red Cross First Aid app), but it also has lots of chapters about survival essentials, like how to build a shelter, tie knots, make nets, find edible plants, hunt, and survive in polar, sea coast, and desert environments. The app can quiz you on your knowledge, and I really like that it provides checklists to help pack survival and medical kits. It even has a morse code transmitter that allows you to type a message to be send with your phone’s backlight. Hopefully you’ll never need this app, but you’ll be glad to have it if you do.
9. GEOCACHING: Geocaching is a kind of treasure-hunting game that’s been around for over 20 years. To play, you’re given the vague location of a real canister or Tupperware container hidden in the wilderness, and you try to find it with a GPS device. The Geocaching app is a super fun way to play a game with friends and go on a treasure hunting adventure while also getting outside. When you open it, shows you all nearby caches, and you can tap them to get information about how find it. And if you do find it, you can log your discovery by writing a note and taking a photo right in the app. It also lets you keep track of trackables, which are physical game pieces that people transport between caches, and it also lets you play the Wonders of the World geocaching game, which challenges players to find caches to collect stamps to fill a virtual passport. You can also watch videos and read help pages to learn all the rules of geocaching, which can get complicated on more advanced geocaching expeditions. You get access to easier-to find-caches for free, but the $30/year premium membership gives you access to higher difficulty caches, advanced searches, and the always-important ability to download offline maps. And if you’re into games outdoors, I’ll give an honorable mention to Pokemon Go, which is STILL the most popular augmented reality adventure game. But I like how you find real, physical options with Geocaching.
10. BEAR: Of course, there’s a also bunch of standard phone apps I use on the trail, like the Kindle and Apple Books apps for reading at night, the Audible and Apple Music apps for listening to books and music in headphones during the day, and Instagram to post photos and videos. But one app that’s not really hiking-specific you might not expect that I use outside all the time is Bear, a great note-taking and note-filing app. Before I head into the outdoors, I use it to save research from the Internet for my hike, like trailhead parking info, custom maps, written trail descriptions, and safety tips that I might not know just by looking at Gaia GPS. I also save instruction manuals for any complicated backpacking gear I’m carrying, like the Garmin InReach, my gravity water filter, and all of my cameras. It’s amazing how much I’ve needed to look at manuals when my stuff has malfunctioned in the middle of nowhere. I keep the rules for a bunch of card and word games in the app for long nights stuck in a tent. And, I use it to keep a daily journal during my long backpacking trips. Since Bear automatically synchronizes all notes offline and then backs them up to your computer automatically when you have phone service, it’s perfect for hiking. Of course, other notetaking apps like Microsoft OneNote and EverNote work fine too, I just think Bear is the best and easiest to use, and it’s also comparatively cheap at $15/year.

Now that you’ve got my list of the best smartphone apps I wouldn’t go hiking without. Grab the ones that interest you, and if there’s others I missed, let me know!