 If you don't know what Altrails is, it's a mobile application for both Android and iOS with a big collection of trail information, trail photos and trail reviews from a community of 10 million hikers, backpackers, mountain bikers and trail runners. In this video, I will walk you through how to use the mobile application for both the free version and the pro version. Before we go ahead and get started here, you want to make sure you go to the App Store and search for Altrails and then the app will look something like that. You can download the app and once you have it on your phone, you can log in using either your Facebook, your Gmail account information and you should be able to access it. I'm going to try to walk you through most of the functionality and the features that the application has to offer. And the first thing that you will see on your screen since I already have the application is a list of hiking trails that are close by and this is going to show up if you do have your location enabled. Now as you can see, I have Camelback Mountain and few other trails here that are marked as completed. Now the first functionality that I want to walk you through here is the search functionality and the first thing that you will see is a search bar at the top of the application. From the search bar, you can start searching either for trail name or parks that are located near you and once you want to start searching, it will allow you to choose from five options. One of them will be all, the second one is places, the third one is parks, trails and lists. On top of the search bar, there is actually a filter button to the left and once you will click it, it will allow you to add more criteria to refine your search and this search can be sorted by the best match, the most popular and the closest. Some of the filters or the criteria that you can choose from are the difficulty, which goes from easy, moderate and hard and you basically can specify what type of trail you are looking for. You can also choose the length of the trail, you want this hike to be 5 miles, 6 miles, 20 miles and so on. The same thing for the elevation gain and this goes from 0 feet up to 10,000 plus feet. You can also choose the rating, are you only looking for trails that are rated five stars, four stars and so on. You can choose the type of activity you are looking for, are you looking for hike and activity, mountain biking, running, backpacking and a bunch of other criteria. One of the filters that I usually find useful is the route type, if you want to choose between a hike that's out and back, a loop or a point to point. Once you choose all your criteria, then you want to go ahead and click see trails and then the search will return all results in the area that you are searching for returning all trails with the criteria that you are interested in. The search results can be returned in a form of a list and basically this is a list of trails that include or give you a high level information about the name of the trail, the difficulty and the reviews. The other way to return the search results in a form of a map and that's by clicking the map or list button to the top right and in the map it's basically going to show you where those trails are located in comparison to your current location and you can switch between a list view and a map view based on what you are looking for. So now we're going to go ahead and dive a little deeper to see what happens or what type of information I have access to when I search for a specific trail. For the purpose of this demo, I'm going to go ahead and search for Emerald Lake Trail. So I'm going to go ahead and choose the first option and always make sure that it's located in the states where you are looking because trail names can be repetitive and you can find the same name of the trail in two different states or three different states. So always make sure that the state is correct. So as you can see, there's a bunch of information here and we will try to cover everything that we are seeing in the screen. The first thing is the name of the trail, the level of difficulty, which is moderate and then the rating. And as you can see here, this trail is rated almost five stars as well as the number of reviews entered by other people. It also specifies the location, which is Rocky Mountains National Park. The little heart located to the right is actually going to allow you to add this trail as a favorite trail right underneath that there are four buttons. There is the direction buttons, the record button, the share and my map. When you click the directions button, you will have an option to either open this map using Apple Maps or Google Maps. Or you can copy the address to the clipboard. And what the direction button is basically your direction to get from where you are right now to the trailhead and the start point of your hike. The second button is the record button, and this functionality is going to allow you to record your hike once you start or once you get to the trailhead. And by clicking the red record button, the application is going to keep track of your trajectory, the distance that you covered, how much time it took you to cover that distance as well as your recorded elevation. The third button here is the share functionality, and this functionality will allow you to share the trail information with your friends and family using either text message, Gmail, mail or even AirDrop if you are using an iPhone. This is a great way to share trails that you find interesting with your friends and family. And the last button here is my map. And this is a great functionality because it draws you the profile of your hike by specifying the distance that you're going to be covering and the elevation gain. And I personally find this very important because sometimes though the trail shows or seems to be short, the elevation gain can be very high. And if you are well prepared and you know what you are getting yourself into, then there is a higher chance for your hike to be successful. Now, the best way to understand the elevation change throughout the hike is by holding the start of the charts. And this will show you the distance change, the elevation as well as the grade of your climb. And as you can see here at the bottom, there is a button that would allow you to download the map layers. This is not available on the free version of all trails, but I'm going to cover it once we start tackling the pro version. Underneath these four buttons, you will be able to see a high level short description about this trail, the length, the elevation gain, the route type, as well as tags for what type of activities this trail is known for. And under the tags, you will be able to see the view of the map, which we already covered when we checked the my map functionality. Now, if you scroll a little bit down, you will be able to see a detailed description of the trail, as well as some additional information on how to get there, how to get to the trailhead and the best routes to choose from. Additionally, there is a section about the weather to give you more information about the weather conditions in the area. Are there any chances of rain or snow just to kind of help you prepare and pack the necessary gear? Also, find more information about the time for the sunrise and the time for the sunset. Now, scrolling down to my favorite area here of the app, the reviews and photos. And this is really great because the application is allowing people from the hiking and backpacking community to go in and share their opinions and feedback once they finish a trail. So you can sort the reviews by either all trails sort, the newest first, all this highest rated, lowest rated and so on. So what I usually do is search for the reviews by the newest first just to kind of see the people who were there a day before, two days before. How was the trail? How was the weather? Was it buried under the snow? Was it well maintained? Was it easy for them to find the trail the first place? So these reviews are very powerful. The second thing are the photos. So a lot of people would go hike trails and then upload some photos to the trail. And once you see this picture, it gives you a better idea whether this is the type of things that you are looking for when you go on your hike. Are you looking for mountains? Do you want to see a lake? So this is pretty useful. And then the last one is the recordings. So just like I showed you a little bit earlier, people would share their recordings and how much time it took them to cover the trail in terms of distance and elevation with other people. And so that will give you a better idea on how much time it will take you to cover your hike. So this is pretty much it for the search functionality. Now I'm going to go back again to the home page to cover a few more things. And the first thing is the favorite page, as you can see here in the bottom of the app. And basically this is a page where all the trails that you marked as favorite are going to be saved. And if you see mine here, it's showing the organ needles trail. And these are basically just some trails that I either want to add to my to-do list or trails that I've done before. And I like them so much that I'm marking them as favorites now. And then the other button here is the record button, which is the same as the record functionality that we covered a little bit ago. The other thing will be the history. And so once you go to the history, you will be able to see all the trails that you recorded, the trails that you completed, as well as your statistics, how many miles did you cover, the elevation gain and so on and so forth. And then the last button here is going to be your profile. And basically this is the area where you will find all information related to you, including your current location, your first and last name, your statistics, reviews, photos, if you downloaded any of them, as well as the settings, just to kind of see whether you want to connect the app to other social media, like Facebook. Do you want to connect it to Garmin, to Apple Health? Do you want to make any changes to the map downloads? Or do you want to make any changes to the default map layer and so on? Now, every time you are in the map, it's going to show you or suggest that you switch from the free version to the pro account. And there are a lot of advantages to using the pro account. The main one is the ability to download the maps for online navigation, because when you are hiking outside in the wilderness, there are higher chances that you won't have service. And if you don't have service, you won't be able to rely on the maps that are provided by all trails. So the recommended thing is to download the maps offline for you to navigate and to know how to get from point A to point B. And this is the best reason or the main reason why you would want to consider a pro account. If you are relying on all trails all the time when you are hiking, then it's probably a good idea to invest in a pro account. And the annual subscription, you're going to be paying about $2.50 a month. And then if you want to subscribe for three years, it's going to cost you about $1.67 for a month. You can either pay every month or you can bill it annually or for the three years. It's up to you. And again, this subscription is going to allow you to download maps offline to your mobile and a bunch of maps to choose from. I am not so great with maps, but you can benefit from all these types of maps that are listed here. This is pretty much it for this application. This is what I personally use to get to and from places. If you guys have any questions, please let me know in a comment and I will be happy to answer them. If you found this video useful, don't forget to subscribe to our channel, your trekking pals Habiba and Alex. And this time I guess it's just Habiba and we'll see you soon on another adventure.