The hike on Sunday gave me the first opportunity to use a new app on my iPhone in the wild – Avenza PDF Maps.
Avenza PDF Maps is (unsurprisingly) a map application for iOS. The key though is that it doesn’t come with it’s own maps – you download apps using its inbuilt store. The New York-New Jersey Trail Conference have a great selection of hiking maps near me, and some of these are available through the Avenza app. I bought the ‘East Hudson (North)’ map for my hike at Breakneck Ridge.
Since this is a universal app I downloaded on both my iPhone and my iPad. Buying a map on one allows you to download it again on the other. Before leaving home therefore I used the iPad app to get a good idea of where we were headed. Once on the path I used my iPhone to figure out where we going. Even better there’s GPS support so you can see exactly where you are (the attached picture is a screen shot from when were on the hike.)
I’d definitely recommend this if you can get good quality maps for your hikes, even though it does feel like I’m ‘cheating’ a little!
Mike Roberts