A GPS track file can be a great help in the backcountry to help you stay on route. What’s even better? A track file with waypoints added. Why?

Because a GPS device (an app on your phone like Gaia GPS or a handheld GPS), can tell you distance and bearing between waypoints. This lets you break your trip down into a series of segments from one waypoint to another.

Use the “Guide Me” (or similar) function on your GPS to see the distance and bearing to the next waypoint. Then, set that bearing on your compass to get you started in the right direction, put your phone in your pocket to help save battery, and shift your attention “heads up” to the landscape around you, and away from your screen.

Compare this with a track without waypoints. Here, you don't have any distance and bearing between points, just a line on your screen. In more complicated terrain, or with low visibility, you may need to check your GPS every few minutes to see that you haven’t wandered too far left or right from the track. This runs down your battery, leads to “heads down” travel, and decreases your situational awareness by shifting your focus on your screen, and not the terrain.

One other benefit to adding waypoints, especially if you’re using our favorite desktop mapping software CalTopo, is with the Pro level subscription and up, you can easily make what CalTopo calls a “Trip Plan”. This is a very helpful table showing all of your waypoints, and the distance, elevation gain, and estimated travel time between each one. We cover this helpful tool and a lot more detail at this article.

Of course, some terrain is more suited to doing this than others. Traveling above timberline in an alpine setting is generally pretty easy, down lower in the trees maybe not.

Here's a screen grab of a CalTopo trip plan for a ski tour around Mt. Hood: