Upfront disclaimer: this is really not much of a climbing tip. It's more of a computer geek tip, but if you have a collection of GPX track files in Google Drive, you might find it helpful. We’ll get back to our regular climbing tips after this one, I promise.

It's handy to keep a collection of good GPX track files in Google Drive, because you can access them from pretty much anywhere to either use on your phone or share them with your hiking or climbing partners. GPX files are just small text files and hardly take up any room, so when you find one that you think you might have a use for in the future, download it and save it! (Even if it's unlikely that you will go on the trip, you might be able to share it with someone else and help them.) Personally, I have hundreds of GPX tracks on my Google Drive, organized in folders for climbs, hikes, mountain bike rides, road bike rides, ski tours, etc.

However, most people do not find it very intuitive to move the files from Google Drive into a backcountry GPS phone app such as Gaia GPS.

But, like most computer related things, it’s easy once you know how. Here are two ways to do it, one method via a desktop computer, and one method all on your phone. (These instructions are for the iPhone, which is what I have, Android folks probably can do something similar.)

To do this, you’ll need:

• a Google account with Google Drive

• a folder on Google Drive with some GPX files in it

• an account at GaiaGPS.com

• the Gaia GPS app loaded to your smartphone.

Method 1 - Desktop / laptop computer

Step 1 - From a desktop / laptop computer, go to Google Drive, navigate to the GPX file you want, right click, download to your computer.

Step 2 - Go to GaiaGPS.com account, click your username or photo in the top right corner, and choose “Upload” from the drop-down menu, screen grab below. Navigate to the GPX file you just downloaded, and select it. (Personally, I do not find this website very intuitive to use, so I thought I’d spell out how to upload a file.)

Step 3 - Open the Gaia GPS phone app. Go to Settings > Account, and toggle the “Sync/Backup” off and back on. Doing this should synchronize all the geo-data in your GaiaGPS.com account, including the track file you just uploaded, with your phone. (The GPX track you just uploaded will probably appear in Saved > Folders on your app.)

Method 2 - Google Drive on your phone to Gaia GPS on your phone

Step 1 - Open the Google Drive app on your phone, navigate to the GPX file you want to use, and tap the “three dots” icon after the file name.

Tap “Open In”. This downloads the file to your phone and gives you an option of several apps in which to open it.

Scroll sideways if needed and select “Copy to Gaia GPS”. This should launch the app and import the file. To see your file, tap Saved > Folders.

Warning, computer nerd stuff only, but it could be useful…

Occasionally, Gaia GPS has a hard time importing / uploading a GPX file direct from Google Drive. This is often because of an “XML “ tag in the first line of the file. Sometimes when Google sees this XML code, the file is not recognized as being a GPX and you are not given the option of the Gaia app to open it.

There are two workarounds for this that I’ve found.

Workaround #1 is to use method one above,: download the GPX file to your desktop, and then upload it to your account at GaiaGPS.com.

Workaround #2 is a little more involved. Open the GPX file in a text editor, and it should look something like the file below (which is a small one of about 10 waypoints.)

Notice the highlighted text in the very first line? Delete all the text between the <brackets> plus the brackets. Save as a new file name, move it back to Google Drive, and it should work fine Google Drive to your Gaia app using the “Open In” method above.