All very good points, esp about the contour lines. I will say off-trail navigation is generally easier in the Rocky Mountains vs the East. I suspect if I was bushwhacking on a more regular basis (vs merely off-trail hiking), I’d have looked at this sooner.

Also, an excellent point about lack of updated maps. That is going to be problematic going forward and a person will need some of sort of device for truly updated maps (or, buy a commercial map such as the NatGeo series).

All a tool in the end. Still need the skill set to use it and make use of it (as opposed to following a pre-defined track)

Also an altimeter – now that you can get a cheap Casio watch with an integrated altimeter, there’s no reason not to carry one. It makes every contour line into a backstop or handrail, and when you don’t have distant objects to sight on, you can tell a lot from altitude and aspect of slope.

But I find that I fire up Backcountry Navigator on almost every trip, leaving the smart-ass phone in ‘airplane mode’ and mostly refraining from looking at the display? Why? To have track recording going. It’s a little extra safety margin (not much, given battery life, but a little) if I have to backtrack. And the track is useful after the trip for map making. I find map making to be enough fun that I carry some extra weight in the form of a big external battery so that I can map even on a week-long section.

And maybe the map-making will help someone. I routinely upload tracks to openstreetmap.org, from which other sites do things like http://waymarkedtrails.org/en/relation/4286650 – that entire track of the Northville-Placid was captured in BackCountry Navigator and cleaned up with software like JOSM and QGIS.

With BackCountry Navigator, I also like the ability to use a custom map. The other side of putting the data in OpenStreetMap is that I can use other people’s data, plus government databases, to make a crowdsourced topo. Since the USGS topographic survey program has been defunded since the first Bush administration, and no new topos have been produced since then, this is definitely the 21st century way to get decent up-to-date maps. If you look at http://kbk.is-a-geek.net/maps/20150606/20150606npt0606b.html and change the dropdown at the upper right to ‘Kevin’s Map’ (scroll all the way to the bottom to find it), you’ll see what I see on the smart-ass phone. You can look at CalTopo, Google Terrain, and such like for comparison. I’m missing a few things for want of data (building outlines, benchmarks, and such), but I do better on land cover (thanks, Landsat!) and on trail routings, since I have ones that were generated by hikers hiking the trail with GPS, rather than by some cartographer penciling in an often ludicrously inaccurate interpolation among a few surveyed points.

Welcome to the future!