Top Resources for Getting You Outside
If you’ve ever been in the shop and asked one of us for help when planning a trip, we’ve most likely pulled up some website or resource that you might not have been familiar with. After years of planning trips and adventuring around you tend to start collecting these resources, but I understand they can be hard to find at first, especially for those who aren’t research oriented.
My goal here is to throw out some of my top resources for getting you outside and trip planning. The resources that will help for a specific trip are going to vary wildly, but the ones I’m going to cover will hopefully span a vast amount destinations and trip types.
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Mountain Forecast
Mountain Forecast is an awesome tool. It gives you the ability to search by range, sub range, and specific mountains. You can search for the weather on summits all over the world and it can make a trip anywhere from climbing 14ers in Colorado to walking up Mount Rogers more enjoyable.
Mountain Forecast only gives the weather 6 days out; it shows wind forecast, sunset and sunrise, and temperature both at the summit of the mountain and typically at the base. Some summits will also indicate a halfway up measurement. I have had fairly good luck using Mountain Forecast for managing expectations on trips as far as weather was concerned. One heads up, the default for Mountain Forecast is to display in Celsius, so make sure you switch that over to Fahrenheit unless you’re secretly Canadian and understand the Celsius scale…
National Park Service/National Forest Service
For the hiker, biker, climber, backpacker, boater, mountaineer, or really anyone trying to get outside, you’ve at some point found your way into a National Park or a National Forest. Both services oversee huge swaths of wilderness and land open to recreation. They all have rules and regulations that vary slightly from one park or forest to another. Luckily, each one lays the information out fairly the same on their websites.
Say you were going to visit the Smoky Mountains, once you search for the park you would land on a page similar to this for each park with alerts and general information. From here you can access park maps in the upper right hand corner, as well as reservation links for permits, campgrounds, and other facilities. On the left, you can click on the “Plan Your Visit” drop down and search for different places to stay, how to get to the park, popular trails, activities such as backpacking, climbing, canyoneering, as well as rules and regulations on those activities.
Again, this is going to vary wildly from park to park so do your research before you go and feel free to get a little lost on the specific park website you’re looking for to make sure you found all the information you need.
Looking for information on the Forest Service websites can be a little more complicated, as their sites are a bit more dated, but once you know the basic layout you can find almost anything you need. For example, say you were heading down to Red River Gorge and want to backpack, but know nothing about the place. You can search for the Daniel Boone National Forest and you’ll land on the page above. From here, you can find information on “Passes & Permits”, “Alerts & Notices”, as well as “Recreation”. The “Recreation” tab will have information on backpacking, hiking, biking, boating, climbing, and many other activities, that again, will vary from forest to forest.
Note that specific areas in each national forest will be managed by different ranger districts and the rules in each district can vary as well. Many national forests will offer maps of trails, information such as usage, ease of access and amenities. National Forests are probably among my favorite places to visit because they are typically less traveled, more rustic and less developed.
FreeCampsites
This was a resource I debated writing about, but it’s been one of my most useful when it comes to camping on the fly or looking for places to stay on the way to a bigger destination. Half of the users for this site are RV travelers (nothing against you), so many of the free sites (noted in green) are simply Walmart or Cabela’s parking lots as well as rest areas along the road. Red indicates pay for camping, and blue indicates permit camping, where you need to acquire a free permit to camp.
In my 3 years using this site I’ve only found 1 yellow, needs to be researched, site. While, as I said above, many of the free sites are more for car campers, I have found Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Sites as well as various state park dispersed camping and private land owners who have opened their unused land up to recreation. These have mostly been out west and up north along the Canadian Boarder but this has been a great, easy to use resource.
Again, trying to use local destinations: you could search for Stanton, Kentucky as a location and Red River Gorge would pop up as a “Pay” location. Each campsite page gives GPS coordinates (for dispersed camping these typically just go to a trailhead), as well as the 5 day forecast, user reviews and ratings, trip photos, and phone signal availability.
I’ll reiterate what I said above, this is an extremely useful website but take reviews with a grain of salt. I’ve been to some sites that had great reviews a few years back and they were terrible, but I’ve also been to ones with terrible reviews and I had the best time and enjoyed the site immensely.
Bureau of Land Management
For BLM’s website I’m just going to throw it out there and let you go down the rabbit hole… There is a stupid amount of maps and information on this website, you almost need to know where you’re going, but I’ve come on here before and found places to stay as well as new areas open to off trail backpacking, 4-wheeling and mountain biking.
BLM manages 245 million acres of public land, 40% of what the federal government is responsible for. Most of this land is open to recreation but can be extremely difficult to access as almost none of it contain improved infrastructure. You will find a lot of dirt roads, beautiful views, pit toilets, lack of people, lack of water, and boundless possibilities for adventure. If you click on the “Visit” tab, you can start your journey down the rabbit hole.
Summit Post/14ers.com
Summit Post is probably my favorite route finding website as far as mountaineering and climbing anything Class IV and down. It shows routes, how to get there, and “red tape” for summits all across the country and the world.
On the other hand, if you find yourself wanting to do any kind of big summit out west, check out 14ers.com. This website lays out information on specific big peaks such as routes, weather, trip reports, maps and other useful details.
Each of these sites will lay out information differently, but I often cross reference them when possible to make sure the information they are giving is solid. I used Mt. Elbert as an example, for Summit Post, they list everything, so as you scroll down you find more info on routes, and rules. With 14ers.com, they have various tabs along the left hand of the screen, you can look at routes, trip reports, peak conditions and more information.
I have always found these websites to both be well put together and reliable. They are managed largely by user posts and both create an environment where knowledge can be passed on to other climbers and hikers. Keep in mind, simply reading about someone else’s experience doesn’t mean you’re ready to go out and start climbing, make sure you’ve done your research and know what to expect.
All Trails
All Trails and I have a love-hate relationship. It’s great for finding trails and getting some basic information, but it does have pay for features and requires an account to use many other features. All Trails is simple, search your destination and you get this:
A list of trails, a small map for the trail, photos, reviews and difficulty rating. Are supplied for each loop. The mapping software All Trails uses is pretty accurate and all the trails I have use from it have worked out but I typically take the trail location and move to the specific Forest Service website or local state park website for the maps that I use on the trail.
USGS Water Measurements
The US Geological Survey puts out a lot of different information, the most useful of which is probably their river data information. They have water gauges on almost 3000 bodies of water around the country and can provide you with some look at river conditions, mostly in the way of water levels. This is something that can take some research in knowing what the normal water level is. For example, at 30’ on the Ohio River you can paddle up or downstream, but higher water will create currents too strong to easily paddle up river.
On the Little Miami, a Milford level around 6-7’ is a good water level to not bottom out on some of the rockier sections of the river. Below you can see an example of the water level graph that USGS puts out for these water gauges, this one is for the Little Miami River.
River levels, speed and safety is to be taken very seriously. If you are not familiar with a stretch of river it’s always a good idea to contact a local outfitter or livery for up to date safety information. Read more about Little Miami Safety here.
- CalTopo
CalTopo is a freeware gem of a website. It combines USGS mapping, Google Maps and much more all into a fairly easy to use interface that will let you plan your trip to wherever you need to go. With this site, it’s not designed for finding trails it’s designed for helping you plan it once you’ve picked a route.
In CalTopo, you can add lines to create your route. You can either do it overland or via trails and roads, once you’ve created a route you can view the elevation profile and distance as well as taking information along the route and around the route. Data points include point elevation, forecasts and line distances.
Still Not Finding All the Information You’re Looking For?
Don’t hesitate to pop into the shop or give us a call! RRT has helped plan trips all over the world. Even if we haven’t been there, we’ll enjoy pulling out a map and looking at these online resources with you, to help make it happen.
This are just a small sample of the resources that are available out there to you. With any resource you find, take it with a grain of salt, research it further, talk to people who have been there, and make sure you know what you’re signing up to go do. I hope all of these things help you to be a little more prepared next time you get outside and hopefully find new destinations for your adventures.
