hi adventure allen all the trips i was supposed to guide in alaska's this year were cancelled ouch anyway a bunch of us guys decided to do our own trip and we chartered a bush plane to drop us north of the arctic circle in the brooks range alaska the skill of these bush pilots in alaska is just amazing dropping us on a postage stamp-sized gravel bar in the middle of a raging river in a deep valley and for people that don't know the gates of the national arctic national park is an amazing place for an adventure it's the northernmost national park in the united states with all the park north of the arctic circle it's the second largest u.s park there are no roads or trails in the park just vast wilderness oh and some very large animals like grizzly bears to navigate 10 days in that vast trailless roadless wilderness we use gaia gps on our own phones this is the same way we've used gps to navigate in some of the most rugged places on the planet patagonia the grand canyon and technical canyoneering in utah we believe it's by a large margin the best navigational tool for the backcountry anyway we got some cool clips of using gaia gps in alaska that we'd like to share with you but this is just a start this is sort of a teaser video for now until our more comprehensive instructional video for gaia gps for hikers and backpackers is done but that video is coming soon and it's going to be super informative and will help you become a safer and more efficient backcountry navigator we think it's worth waiting for oh and finally i'd be remiss if i didn't say this i'm filled with such deep gratitude to have been in such a pristine and wild place since i haven't been able to get out into true wilderness for so long i think others will probably understand what i'm talking about hi adventure allen here and we're out in the brooks range gates of the arctic in alaska this is day five of the trip and we've been navigating all this train down here that's a winiak in the distance we've been on the back side of that train with all the snow we've been using gaia gps to navigate for this trip and the reason i'm sort of shooting this clip today right now is we did a very elegant piece of navigation using gaia and we were planning on this huge gully below me that we had to get around and we were planning on going way way up around this ridge line to get around it and we were sitting down and camped there last night and were like well what if we could just get up this gully here like if we could just get down across the bottom of this gully um and get up here we'd save ourselves a crapload of time and effort so we're looking on the map and we as we get up on this we're sort of like wow we really could kind of do that we're sort of zooming in and looking at these finer terrain details so we did and we came up and we found this we found this incredible game trail exactly where you want it to be i mean you can see that [Music] caribou have definitely been coming up here so we just saved ourselves maybe uh you know a third of a day of hiking and a lot of effort we're just going to pop right up over there we're going to hit some hard pan tundra and it's going to be easy cruising so thank you very much gaia it's an incredible navigation tool when you're out in some really bad ass wilderness areas where there are no trails there's nothing and and the map is everything navigating with gaia gps as our primary navigational tool and i'd like to talk to you about um what map layers we use and what type of maps we use sort of our whole navigation system here first of all i am using gaia gps with my iphone in my pocket and that's my primary navigational tool but to be safe and i do have paper maps um you can take a look here these are usgs topo maps that i've printed out from from gaia and you can see that they exactly match this usgs topo layer that i'm using on gaia so all the map features are exactly the same as this map so this is no different than the paper map it's a little easier and convenient to use and navigate with i also have obviously a very high quality compass here with declination i'm fully capable of navigating with the compass and paper maps i've been doing it for 50 years but the guy is a little easier the other the other layer that i do use um with gaia is the gaia toppo these usgs copper maps are scanned they're raster they take up a fair amount of memory so i use the gaia topo maps which are vector-based and they're much smaller and faster to load they take up less memory so i can take a big huge area and it's a backup map in case [Music] i get off of this map set i do carry that an entire map set of our trip that that i take notes on and stuff in a this big gallon ziploc freezer bag which fits the maps um so um obviously i've downloaded these maps onto my phone before the trip um i've also got some route planning and some route on on my phone here of potential routes that i might take and obviously you need to download these maps ahead of time when you're in the field and you have no no signal and i have this i so i have this uscs topo map which i have dialed up but if i dial this back [Music] and then go back to done now i'm looking at this gaia topo map which also has a reasonable level of detail it's got ernie pass in there and all the stuff that i need not quite doesn't quite match the usgs topo map but it's perfectly adequate to navigate with and it it pans and moves and refreshes a lot faster on the phone and it's it's a lot smaller file it's easier to download but you definitely need to download these before the trip so anyway that's the maps that that we're taking up here into alaska if i were in a national park the other map layer that i would use would be the national geographics trails illustrated maps and those are also available with gaia and if you're in those parks those are the ones that have all the regulations all the current trails because these usgs maps are sometimes 50 60 years even 70 years out of date in terms of the trails and and other features on them and the national geographic trails illustrated maps for the parks are usually the latest and greatest with the correct trails and all the camping regulations and a bunch of information that you need but those would be the three primary layers the first layer is the usgs topo then i would back it up with the the gaia toppo and then third if i'm in a national park i would definitely have the national geographic trails illustrated maps well that's all we have for now again stay tuned for our upcoming instructional video gaia gps 101 for hikers and backpackers and please go ahead and like this video follow our channel finally through adventure allen you can get jai gps at a steep discount only 16 for your subscription check out the comments section below this video for the discount anyway this is adventure allen signing out you
