October 25, 2024
Matching your skills, fitness, and experience to your route is key to staying safe in remote terrain, but you can only do that if you have enough information about the trail. To help everyone stay safer, komoot has a bunch of planning and community features which not only provide that information, but ensure it’s as accurate as possible. Without further ado, here are seven features you should pay attention to when planning your next hike or mountain bike adventure in the mountains.
Highlights:
Highlights — the red dots on the map — are recommendations from other adventurers that provide specific insights into the trail, like the quality of the trail in different seasons or weather conditions. Tips from the community also help to verify whether certain trails are well-trodden.
Use Highlights to stay safer: The information shared by fellow hikers and riders offers valuable insights into what to expect. Check out the tips so you have more information before heading out, as knowledge is power when it comes to safety in the outdoors.
Trail View:
The Trail View feature uses photos sourced from public routes on komoot, to show snapshots of the trail.
Use Trail View to stay safer: Similarly to Highlights, Trail View photos are useful for providing extra context about the trail. Use it to check if the terrain matches your experience and confidence level, so you can be certain you’re heading out with the right skills and equipment for the route.
Route Ratings:
The routes you find on the map have star ratings to verify the quality of the trails. You’ll also see how many people have completed a route (because a high rating from 20 people is more reliable than a high rating from just one person).
Use route ratings to stay safer: One person exploring a trail doesn’t necessarily guarantee it’s well-maintained and safe to use. Found a cool ready-made route? Check how many people have already completed it and give more weight to ratings and routes done by many people.
Route Warnings:
A route warning is a pop-up screen providing extra information about your planned route; information that is not easily conveyed in the map itself.
Use route warnings to stay safer outside: Pay attention to the route warnings, particularly if they mention dangerous terrain or equipment requirements. At the very least they should give you pause to cross-check the map more closely and slow down to consider whether you and your group have the skills and confidence required to tackle the terrain.
Elevation Profile:
Komoot displays the altitude at every point on your route, displaying it in an easy-to-interpret visual overview.
Use the elevation profile to stay safer: Visualizations help you to imagine the route. Is it a gradual uphill with a steep descent or is it a steep ascent followed by a plateau? This information helps you to assess the route based on the fitness of your group. For example, a steep path means shaky legs, so a less experienced group might prioritize a longer but more gradual descent if it means avoiding a technical descent with greater opportunity for someone to trip.
Swiss Alpine Club Scale:
Komoot maps use the Swiss Alpine Club trail grading system to indicate the technical difficulty of a trail. You’ll see it on most trails shown on the komoot map, on a scale ranging from T1 to T6 (read more about the SAC scale here).
Use the SAC scale to stay safer: Firstly, familiarize yourself with the Swiss Alpine Club’s grading system. Pay attention to the scale on the komoot map (you might need to zoom in on the map to reveal it) and ensure you’re only planning routes on trails that are within your current ability.
Easy Rerouting:
You can reroute in the tap of a button on komoot if conditions change unexpectedly and you need to find an alternative route home.
Use easy rerouting to stay safer: Out in the wild, conditions change and there’s always a chance of encountering the unexpected. In this case it’s best to readjust your plans accordingly, especially if your gut is saying “don’t do it”. The ability to reroute on the fly provides flexibility, which is vital for staying safe in remote terrain.
These are specific features that help you plan safer routes, but where knowledge is concerned, more is often better. Here’s more information about route planning on komoot:
Your phone is a GPS: How komoot uses it to navigate your route
Why am I hiking on a road and other routing mysteries solved
Interested in more topics that affect your confidence and safety in the mountains? Visit this page full of safety-related resources.