Gear Review | Gaia GPS

GEAR REVIEW Lost in the woods? There’s an app for that

By Jim Margolis NOLS Instructor

If memories of your NOLS course include counting contour lines on a tattered USGS 7.5’ minute quad, you may have wished you were allowed to use Gaia GPS, a popular outdoor navigation app for smartphones. Faster than you can say “triangulation”—and way faster than you can take a bearing off of three nearby features—you can show your location on the map by simply pressing a button. You can also record a track to remember your favorite hikes or backcountry ski runs, or to document that you really did walk two miles in the wrong direction.

The name Gaia (guy-yuh) comes from Greek mythology—she is the Goddess of the Earth, or Mother Nature. Gaia GPS takes advantage of the GPS chips and LCD screens in modern phones, overlaying location information on top of a map and greatly simplifying outdoor navigation. With a $40 per year subscription, you can access over 350 map sources, including topographic maps for the entire world, satellite imagery, public and private land boundaries, and many specialty map layers for different recreational and professional applications. Here are just a few of the available resources: • Slope-angle shading—Useful for winter backcountry users like skiers, snowboarders, and snowmobilers, slope angle maps can be used to get a general sense of the steepness of terrain, which can help you identify potential avalanche terrain. • Public and private land boundaries—Want to find public land for free camping on a road trip? Or make sure you aren’t trespassing on private land when hunting for elk? You can put

these overlays on top of your favorite base map. • Native Land—The Native Land

Territories map, produced by Native-

Land.ca, provides a starting point for learning about the human history of a location, whether it be your home or a place you are visiting. In many popular wilderness areas and National Parks,

Native Americans were murdered and forcibly removed by the United States government. This history, coupled with the larger history of dispossession of Native American and Indigenous lands worldwide through genocide and fraudulent treaties, contributes to the erasure of modern-day Indigenous societies. It’s important to recognize this is not just a history lesson. The cultural and economic impacts of genocide and forced removal remain contemporary issues. • National Geographic topographic maps—A digitized version of the famous Trails Illustrated paper maps, this layer has excellent coverage of popular U.S. parks and long trails like the AT, CDT, and PCT. • USGS topo—The original topo map for the United States. If you took a landbased NOLS course in the U.S., you’ll probably remember these well. Whatever you use it for, consider it only a tool to build on the navigation skills you learned on your NOLS course. Ran out of battery? Dropped your phone in the river? There’s not an app for that. You’ll be thankful you carry a paper map and compass as backup, and even more thankful that you know how to use them.

Outdoor navigation app Gaia GPS allows access to more than 350 map sources. StockSnap Mockup

Jim Margolis is a field instructor and lives in Lander, Wyoming. He was introduced to NOLS by his father, who took a semester course in 1974. His bio photo is from his best Halloween costume ever.

Wilderness Medicine Quiz

ANSWER | d) More than 4,000

Wilderness Quiz

ANSWER | 1, Joe Pool, a Texas Democrat who supposedly said that the Act did not go far enough to protect our few remaining wild lands.