Our Story. About Mapitfirst.
About Us
Why we made Mapitfirst, the hiking software for the Canadian Rockies:
We, like many of you, are keen to be outside as often as we can. Since the late 70's we've been hiking, backpacking and cycling through the mountain parks every opportunity we can. As life gets busy with careers, houses, kids and with the usual responsibilities of life, the time available for hiking gets limited.
The standard method of planning a hike was pretty simple. Get some maps, paw your way through some books and talk to other people, and hope that in the end it all comes together. The truth is; planning a hike is nearly as much fun as hiking, but not quite. If you get it wrong, you end up with one of two things: an adventure of epic proportions, or a forgettable hike that makes you wonder why you do it in the first place! With busy lives, you really want to make the best of the time you have available.
The "maps, books and people" method of planning is good, but terribly inefficient. There had to be a better way.
In the past few years, we have seen significant changes in technology. Software that was once only available to the GIS specialist has become affordable and, more importantly, user friendly. Data and information has been available for quite some time through the internet but is difficult to find and use. GPS units were crazy expensive but are now very affordable. All these things have happened in the past few years - but somebody had to put them all together.
At first we were going to have a simple version of what you see now. We had the old green topographical maps (of which I still revere) with the most recent trails on them. They were okay, but lacked content. Then we got together with some of the publishing companies and talked about putting their trail descriptions on the maps. That really made the tool kit useful, but the maps looked rather old and outdated compared to what you can buy off the shelf. So we embarked on rebuilding the maps to have a new look and feel to them. Now we had the "Maps and Books" component of planning a hike, but the "people" component was a little light. The internet provides such a great way for you to communicate with other like minded people, it seemed like the perfect fit. If we provide a forum that people can compare notes and communicate details about their recent hiking experiences, we would have the complete picture; "Maps, Books and People". Teaming up with ClubTread.com now allows you to interact with like-minded people and find out about trails and adventures other people have experienced.
It has been a great deal of work getting the product to this point. We expect that over the next year or two we will learn how to do things better and with feedback, the product will improve. We really think that Mapitfirst will help you plan your hikes more efficiently and with more chance of success than ever before. We hope this tool will help you get out there to enjoy the mountains, and leave some of the technology behind.