[aembleton]

> ...to be following a phone screen's "directions" while walking in almost zero visibility would be foolhardy in the extreme.

Can you expand on that? I have done this using mapy.cz and AlpineQuest dozens of times in the last ten years. The only exceptions for me has been in sub zero conditions where I want to keep my phone battery warm and on mountain tops, so I take compass bearings from the phone app and follow the bearing. I have found following anything on a phone sketchy on mountain summits in the past because you will have turned around and lost your orientation. A bearing resolves that.

All other times though, I find it incredibly useful. Also, I like to use AlpineQuest to track where I have been in a low power way by recording my location once a minute - this helps me to keep a mental picture of where I am on the map should the phone die. I also have a paper map which fortunatelly I've only needed a couple of times when the temperature is too low for the phone.

[logifail]

> Can you expand on that? I have done this using mapy.cz and AlpineQuest dozens of times in the last ten years.

I've just pulled up the summit of Snowdon on mapy.cz[0] to find something we can compared with a traditional 1:25000 walking map of the same area, an extract from the OS Explorer map can be found on page 5 of this PDF[1]

To my mind, the difference is very striking.

If you are stuck in the outdoors in poor visibility, every feature on the map can be useful. mapy.cz gives a good overview of the summit and the routes to and from it, but compared with the OS map there is a lot of detail missing. Not least contour lines!

[0] https://en.mapy.cz/zakladni?x=-4.0756102&y=53.0701102&z=17 [1] https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/map-rea...

[aembleton]

Sorry, I meant the mapy.cz app. I agree that the website does look poor especially the lack of contours. The app gives you these, hill shading and more importantly offline maps in a very efficient way - the whole of Wales is only 175.16 MB.

Heres a screenshot from the app [0]. I wouldn't normally have it in landscape, but I've tried to make it as similar as possible to the Ordnance Survey example you gave.

In my opinion, the only downside is that mapy.cz uses the local place names, so you get Yr Wyddfa instead of Snowdon. Fortunatelly, you can still search for Snowdon and get taken there. But the local names can be confusing - I wish they had the option to have English names.

I also should add that mapy.cz doesn't give you bearings so I still have AlpineQuest for that.

[0] https://photos.app.goo.gl/vMAZDhkBnhb44Fsx8