This article covers a free hiking trail app to get trail guides with navigation and offline maps. No doubt apps like Google Maps, Waze, etc. are good for directions and navigation. These apps are excellent but they don’t offer much for outdoor activities and adventures.
Wikiloc is a free outdoor navigation app with millions of crowd-sourced hiking trail guides all around the world. To be exact it has around 13,621,622 trails worldwide for hiking, biking, kayaking, and other 60+ types of outdoor activities. With this app, you can find trails near you and download offline maps to navigate without the internet. You can also add your trail by recording your route on the map, adding waypoints and pictures along the way.
If you do hiking often then this app offers premium features that can be really useful and time-saving. The premium version allows live tracking and live location sharing with GPS navigator that guides you on the trails with sound alerts. And if you use Garmin GPS or Apple Watch, you can send tracks from your phone to those devices without a computer.
Also read: Free 3D GPS App for Mapping Outdoor Activities
Free Hiking Trail App to Get Trail Guides with Navigation, Offline Maps
Wikiloc app is available for Android and iOS devices. It also has a web app where you can find trails and upload trails. To unlock the functionality of this app, you have to create an account. You can sign up using an email ID or log in with your Google or Apple account.
The app opens at the Explore tab where it lists outdoor trails near you. It shows a huge list of trails with name, activity type, distance, elevation, and technical difficulty. From here, you can tap on a trail to get more information on it. Doing this takes you to that trial where you can follow the trials on the map and download the trial map for offline navigation. You can add the trails to your favorites and share them with friends.
Filter Trials
Apart from browsing the list of nearby trails, you can also check the trails on the map and use filters to find out trails that fit your expectations. You can find the trails using the following filters:
- Activity type
- Distance
- elevation gain
- Technical Difficulty
There are a few premium filters as well which allows you to filter trials by time and month and provide weather forecast as well.
Browse Local Trails & Download Offline Maps
This app lets you search trails by name and photos. When you press the search box, it gives you an option to list the local trails which you can browse on the map for more information. While exploring a trail on the map, you get a globe-shaped icon on the screen. This icon is for downloading the trail map for offline navigation. When you tap that icon, it shows you the size of the offline map along with a download button. This way, you can save trails to your phone and follow them even if there is no internet.
Record Trails
This app also lets you record your route and upload it as a trail on the Wikiloc. You can find this feature in the second tab of the app. It shows you live location on the map along with a button to start the recording. The recording interface tracks your location on the map and shows a timer on the top. It also has a camera button that you can use to add photos and waypoints to the route. This app also shows real-time statistics along the route such as speed, elevation, distance covered, etc.
The recording is resumable means you can pause it whenever you want and then resume it when you are back on track. Once the track is completed, you can upload it to Wikiloc by entering the following information:
- Name
- Description
- Activity type
- Trail Buddies
- Technical Difficulty
- Photos
Give this hiking trails app a try here.
Wrap Up
Wikiloc offers a huge database of trails for various types of outdoor activities. No matter what your favorite outdoor activities are, you can easily find trail guides for that. The offline maps feature is really handy for visiting remote locations and mountains where you possibly won’t get the internet. And, the fact that you can record your routes makes it a must-have app for hikers and adventurers.
