Tobi loves maps. Not a single visit to the book store or outdoor shop goes by without him poring over an assortment of paper maps, spread out across a large table. Before any multi-day trek, I actually urge him to buy one. This is simply because maps make him happy, not because we’d be lost without one.

Tobi doesn’t need maps. It appears his brain was fitted with an internal, infallible GPS chip. His ability to visit a place once, and then years later still know how to get from A to B in a jungle of small, identical looking, narrow streets, astonishes me.

More astoundingly still, we’re hiking, in the middle of nowhere, and the trail has disappeared into oblivion, but he knows which way to go; by using the location of the sun. My sense of direction has never failed me either. I simply don’t have one and would never rely upon it.

For people like me, there’s Google Maps and TomToms. We’d be totally lost even in everyday life otherwise. I spent one year in the field sales force of a confectionary company, managing a few dozen stores, and thanks to the TomTom I managed quite well. This was until about four weeks before the year was up, and the TomTom broke. For eleven months, I had visited a large wholesale store right next to the highway twice a week. It was only thanks to the huge blue-yellow METRO sign that I knew which exit to take in month twelve. I’d rather not recall the odyssey into the outskirts of some larger cities.

So, you can probably imagine that the prospect of hiking in rough backcountry terrain is somewhat disheartening. I can more or less decipher a map, a large-scale one with proper labels and such. However, answering “where am I?” on that map, remains a total mystery, unless I use Google Maps on my smartphone with location tracking turned on, which works well in urban settings with a stable internet connection.

Thankfully, one doesn’t need WIFI or cellular reception for GPS to work and the latest smartphones are all fitted with a GPS chip and therefore work as equally useful GPS devices for hiking, running and walking. They’ve become quite indispensable to us in off-road locations, especially when we don’t just care about getting to our destination, but want to follow a particular route.

We download a GPS track (recorded route to a destination containing geographical coordinates, altitude and distance) in a gpx (GPS exchange format) or kml (Keyhole Markup Language) file format and navigation is super easy, even for me.

Handheld GPS devices also do the trick but since I carry my smartphones with me on hikes and runs anyway, I have never considered an additional piece of gear.

Following the battery management guidelines below, we manage 5+ days of battery life in the outdoors. Tobi uses both his phone and his gps watch, a Suunto Ambit 3. The watch doesn’t support maps but is useful to record our tracks.