To complete this assignment, you must have a Membership or Premium Membership, which cost $20 or $36 per year, respectively. To get started, download the Gaia GPS app: It has the same functionality you’d expect of a traditional handheld GPS - like pinpointing its location, and navigating to waypoints - but a GPS app is lighter, less expensive, and more user-friendly. It acts as a map library, just in case your printed documents are damaged (or lost) or if you unexpectedly hike off of them. This will preserve the app’s functionality even in the backcountry without reliable cell service. Your assignment is to download maps in Gaia GPS for offline use. Classroom - which seems designed mostly for a Gen Z audience - does not allow for style sheets, (un)ordered lists, bold or italic type, or embedded images. We run the Curriculum in Google Classroom, but I’ve opted to share this assignment publicly so that its 900 words are less unwieldy. Assignment: Download maps in Gaia GPS for offline useĪs part of our guided backpacking trips, clients are required to participate in an 8-part Planning Curriculum that prepares them for their trip and that can be retooled easily for their personal trips. But I value the reliability and efficiency of these more analog methods, and I appreciate the art of using them. Some hikers may consider my preferences old-fashioned, since it’s increasingly common to navigate exclusively or primarily with GPS. Watch (good), ABC watch (better), or GPS watch (best), andĪs both a backup and supplement to these tools, my smartphone has a GPS app like CalTopo (good) or Gaia GPS (better) along with downloaded map data for offline use.Ĭollectively, these four instruments constitute my navigation system.On most trips and in most locations, to navigate I rely primarily on my:

Expert gps save map