Best Tools for Camping
This started as a list of camping apps for a phone that had just learned to do GPS. The phone part is settled. What is worth writing down now is the short list of things a phone is genuinely better at than the old way, and the shorter list of things it is worse at.
Better on a phone:
- Finding a legal place to sleep. On public land in the US this is the real problem, and layered maps that show land ownership and boundaries solve it. Gaia GPS has the useful layers; CalTopo is better for planning it at a desk.
- Weather you can act on. Not the icon on the home screen: the point forecast for the elevation you are actually camping at, which can be a different day's weather from the valley below.
- Star and plant identification, which is the thing everyone actually does with a phone round a fire, and which it does very well.
Worse on a phone:
- Light. A phone torch flattens everything, ruins your night vision and drains the battery you need for the map. A headlamp is a few ounces and is the single best piece of camp gear there is.
- Time. A cheap watch means you can leave the phone off, which doubles its useful life.
- Calling for help. There is usually no signal where you camp. If you go out alone or off-trail, a satellite messenger is the piece of kit that changes outcomes, and phones have only partly caught up with the newer emergency-satellite features.
The unchanged advice: put the phone in airplane mode on arrival, keep it warm overnight in the sleeping bag so the battery survives, and carry a small power bank. That covers ninety per cent of what goes wrong with using a phone outdoors.
Part of the guide to gadgets and power.