CalTopo: Backcountry Mapping

For planning and navigation works great!

You must use a third party login to use it. Either Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, or Yahoo. Of course they do. There is no such thing as a free lunch, or app. You pay for it in lack of privacy and your personal information being sold and shared.

My search and rescue unit utilize CalTopo . It would be so helpful if I could view this app in Apple CarPlay

It couldn’t find most major trails in Mt Rainier NP. Slow downloads. Non intuitive user interface. Low resolution maps. Not worth $20/ year.

I’ve tried everything and it only loads part of the map. Very frustrating.

This is the best mapping app

Cannot use without an account Cannot use without a 3rd party account such as Google Apple Microsoft Yahoo Guess it’s back to Gaia

Application uses the old image based instead of vector based graphics. This means that a single zone about one third the size of an average state and two other much smaller zones added up to downloads around 70GB. And to make matters worse these took a full day to download with some coming down quickly and others taking as much as 5-10 minutes for a single tile. To make matter worse the loading of the maps from disk is slow and choppy. Though the map details seem fine for what they are. The actual data provided while hiking is very minimal. Distance, and net elevation change is about it. So you have no idea how much elevation change actually happened throughout the trip. As a comparison Gaia (which is now owned by a less than trustworthy company and is far too much money a year for the least expensive option) allowed me to download about 1/2 the country as one zone and most of California as another for a total of about 10 GB of disk. They download in about 20 minutes with no slowdowns. And they load very quickly. They actually so more useful information and map detail that the much larger downloads from this application. Tracking a hike tells me distance amount of elevation rise and fall and net. Average speed average speed moving time moving total trip and time stopped. It also shows on a bar graph the speed over time and the elevation change over time. So while I don’t like the other company nor the new pricing, I am afraid that I will have to not use this application as it simple does not let a minimum requirement.

I use CalTopo from home on WiFi - it’s great. The problem is when I am in the field the maps that I have downloaded don’t always load. In theory, my GPS location should place me on one of my downloaded maps (this is exactly how other apps like Trailforks work). In practice, the maps load…sometimes. This is hugely frustrating for a paid app.

Bought the upgrade and nothing changed