GPS Hike Tracker

NJ had a relatively mild winter and we were able to get out a local park and take some short hikes. We went to Watchung Reservation a couple of times, hiking different short loops.

I have an Android phone that has a built in GPS and had used the tracking app provided by Google to track some hikes. The nice thing about these apps are their ability to track mileage, altitude and time. I saw an ad on backpacker.com for a hiking app called GPS Trails. It is a free app from Trimble Outdoors and worked pretty well. So I upgraded to Backpacker GPS Trails Pro. You can take pictures, videos and voice notes during the hike and they are automatically tagged to your current location. At the end of your hike you can upload it to the backpacker.com website and make it part of their searchable catalog of hikes.

I used the app to track one of our hikes in January around Watchung Reservation. We  hiked the entire perimeter following the pink marked “history trail”. The trail is about 6 miles in distance and has many placards telling the history of the park.

Here are a few pics at the trail head and out on the trail.

I used the GPS Trails PRO and uploaded the hike to backpacker.com. The hike can be viewed on the Trimble outdoors web site.