Mt Adams Loop

An offline hiking app that knows exactly one trail: the 36-mile circumnavigation of Mount Adams, Washington. It knows nothing else, and that is the point. WHY ONE TRAIL No single trail goes around Mount Adams. The route links Round the Mountain #9, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Highline #114 — and then, on the east side, runs out of trail altogether. Roughly four miles are moraine, loose rock and glacier with nothing to follow. A general-purpose map has no opinion about that, because it has to hold every trail in the world. This one holds one, in detail. WHAT'S IN IT • Thirty marked points around the loop — every water source, every legal camp, every creek crossing, the crux • Twenty-eight of them annotated with beta from trip reports, spoken aloud as you reach them • Full topographic basemap for the whole route, compiled into the app before it ships • Slope shading, computed on your device from a 10 m elevation grid, so you can see the steep ground and pick a line around it rather than discovering it on arrival • The 6,250 ft contour drawn across the trail-less section — the one instruction every published account of that ground repeats • Distance, climb and hours remaining, always as what's LEFT rather than an arrival time • A real moving map on Apple Watch, drawn for a watch screen, at walking scale — and when you wander off the trail, an arrow and a distance pointing back to it • Elevation profile showing which climbs are still ahead of you • Drop your own meeting points — "second creek past camp" — and the app tells you when you arrive • Records the hike as an Apple Health workout with a GPS route, and exports GPX COMPLETELY OFFLINE There is no networking code in the app at all. No account, no subscription, no premium tier, no analytics, nothing to log in to and nothing sent anywhere. It behaves identically in airplane mode, which is the only mode it will ever see out there. THE OFF-TRAIL SECTION Between Avalanche Valley and Sunrise Camp there is no trail. The app draws two separately recorded lines through it, dashed, and says out loud that neither is authoritative — published traces of that ground disagree with each other by up to 800 metres. A single confident line there would be a lie told at the worst possible moment. BEFORE YOU GO This is a navigation aid, not a safety device. The app says so on first launch, in a warning you have to read and accept before it will do anything. The route suits experienced hikers only. Four miles of it have no trail, crossing unstable rock and a crevassed glacier where a slip is not recoverable and help is hours away at best. Read several independent guides and the most recent trip reports before you commit to it. Carry a paper map and a compass and know how to use them. Carry a satellite communicator with an SOS function — there is no mobile coverage across most of the loop. The eastern side of the route crosses Yakama Nation land, which is open only for a limited season on terms set annually — confirm access with Yakama tribal forestry before you go. Conditions, snow and river crossings change on timescales no app knows about.