6 APPS for Your Summer Adventures

I am always on an adventure with my kids. There are 6 APPS I use for my summer adventures, they make planning, logging and my adventures possible.  Get these apps (free or nominal fee) on your phone and get outdoors and play today!

 

All Trails

We have been hiking a lot more as a family and with friends.  Using All Trails, we are able to check out reviews from others, favorite our hikes completed and record our hikes. We use this when picking out our next hike to see difficulty ratings, what we may see on the trail and trail maps.  The feature of saving our hike route, our time hiking and mileage is a great fitness factor for the kids, wanting a longer or shorter hike for our next.  While hiking we refer to the app at intersections to see which trail we may want to do next and where it will lead to. Great for hikes with multiple trails that cross paths.

SEEK

Seek is a great app when hiking and you see a bird, insect, reptiles, mollusks and more.  App is a joint initiative from The California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. The kids have fun hovering the camera over plants and bugs to find out what it is.  We found a Fungi and Eastern Newt on our most recent hike.  The app gives you information on species and brief overview. Newt was not poisonous to humans and the fungi we found was edible (although we did not try).

 

 

GEOCACHING

We love Geocaching in my family, check out our recent geocaching post here. We have gotten many of our friends into geocaching recently and it motivates my kids while bike riding, hiking and even on our boat. Wherever we are, we just open up the app and check to see if there are any caches hidden around.

Trail Link

Are you looking for new bike rides?  This gives you the trail names and locations for places in your area.  I use this in conjunction with Ride GPS for our bike rides.  I find them here and then go.  Trail Link includes more than just bike trails, also mountain biking, snow shoeing, it has to have multiple uses to be listed on their app/website.   Did you know that many of their trails are old railroad tracks that are no longer in use and being repurposed for recreational use.  This also means, especially for the Hudson Valley region, the amount of paths is expanding but also connecting where you can travel very far on these trails around the region.

Ride with GPS

When we go on our bike rides I track our routes and milage.  I am able to see where to go, store pictures for our bike ride and speeds, stops and time we were out.  I love how this app makes a bike riding scrap book of our family rides.  The kids checking their speeds, the map of our journey when finished.  Also as a map, you can see which way to go when you get to crossroads.

Recreation.gov

Looking for camping, fishing, getting out doors with your family?  Check out this app which also connects state and federal lands for use.  Includes closure updates, and you can book activities and lodging through their app and/or website.  Currently their campaign on social media is promoting getting outdoors and #RecreateResponsibly.

 

Which app will you try first?  Have another one we should add? Comment below for us to see!