Contents: Highlight your route

Why you should highlight your route
Bad weather
Offline snap-to-path plotting

Why you should highlight your route

When navigating with a paper map it’s helpful to have run a highlighter pen over the route. With an electronic screen, route highlighting does more than draw the eye, it makes navigating much easier.

One of the real disadvantages of navigating with electronic devices is that a small screen provides a poor overview of the local topography and your route. You must see where you are heading on the map to make the right decisions at key points, like path junctions. On a paper map you might have your entire day visible but even with a large phone, your destination could easily be off the screen. If the route is not highlighted, map browsing is required to work out where to go and you need to remember what’s off-screen when working back to the decision point. The tiny screens and clunky interfaces on a watch or a handheld make this process painfully slow.

However, if you highlight your route with a brightly coloured line then this small-screen drawback goes away.  At any decision point, a quick glance at the line on the map will instantly reveal which way to go. Not only does a highlighted line remove the need to browse the map but it makes mistakes less likely.

It’s not just at key decision points that route highlighting is useful. An accurately plotted line will define exactly where you should be, at any point on the route. Staying on that line is almost as intuitive as walking along a real path. Great.

Always highlight your route.

Bad weather

When the weather is terrible and you want your navigation to be flawless, following a coloured line on a GNSS device could be a lifesaver. In a howling Scottish winter white-out, on a featureless snow-covered plateau, the paths could be buried under feet of snow.  To accurately travel over any distance in these conditions is a serious challenge for the best map and compass user, especially alone. Walking solo, you can’t send a team member ahead on a compass bearing to ensure you don’t inadvertently crab sideways. When the clouds are on the hills, fog can hide all the features that would normally help you work out where you are. Night will do the same. It’s not unusual for mountain rescue teams to be called for people who are lost even though they carry a paper map and compass.

Armed with a coloured line on a phone or GPS unit, you can be confident of staying precisely on course over any distance.  A bit of modern magic.

Always highlight your route.

Offline snap-to-path plotting

If you have a change of plan whilst walking it’s helpful to highlight the new route, to keep navigation easy. An app that offers offline snap-to-path plotting makes this quick and easy to do. Recommended. A manual plot works too, but it’s slow to manually plot a route accurately.

Most phone apps require the internet to provide snap-to-path plotting. You can test your own navigation app out by simulating being off-grid. Put the phone into flight-mode to switch off all connections to the internet. Now try a snap-to-path plot. Popular apps like OS Maps and Outdooractive will lose their snap-to-path ability and only offer manual plotting.

Apps like OsmAnd, Locus Map 4 and Gaia GPS can store the invisible routing information and provide a snap-to-path routing tool on the phone. They will work anywhere.

Garmin GNSS handhelds offer snap-to-path routing if used with a ‘routable’ map. However, these units are very clunky to use compared to a phone.

Always highlight your route. The smaller the screen and the slower the device, the more useful route highlighting is.