Wednesday Wisdom? That may be a stretch (though it is alliterative). Every Wednesday we share our thoughts in rotating subject areas: gear, social media, hiking/backpacking/camping resources, and tips from the field. These items are culled from our weekly GetHiking! enewsletter, which also includes news and information on hikes and backpack trips in our GetHiking! and GetBackpacking! universes. Subscribe to our weekly enewsletter here.

This week’s focus: Hiking Resources

Follow the sun

We can’t promote the sunrise-sunset.org resource enough: simply plug your location into the site and you can find, by date, the start of twilight, sunrise, sunset, end of twilight, day length, solar noon, and the start and end of both nautical twilight and astronomical twilight. Especially helpful this time of year. sunrise-sunset.org

Hiking ABCs from AHS

Let’s say you’re just getting into hiking and you’re one of those folks who make a beeline for trailheads with addresses (see above). Now, having read today’s Tip, you see how knowing those secondary trailheads can be a big plus. But how to find them? And once you find one of these more remote hikes it probably will behoove you to be a little more prepared — after all, there likely will be fewer people around to help should something go awry. You can keep things from going awry — and being prepared if they do — by becoming an informed hiker, and one good way to do that is to check out the American Hiking Society’s Hiking 101 page, where you’ll get tips on everything from the 10 Essentials for your day pack to key outdoor skills to planning your outing. Find it here. 03.18.2021

Smart filming with your smartphone 

So you watch these hiking and backpacking videos (see Media, below) and think, Man, what kind of gear are they shooting with, and how do they get those shots? Sometimes they are shooting with pretty pricey gear. But sometimes they’re shooting with their smartphone. Smartphone video has come a long way, baby, and as Josh the Intern explains in “How to Film a Hiking Video with Just a Smartphone,” with just one additional piece of equipment — a tripod with smartphone mount — you can shoot some pretty inspiring videos yourself. Josh starts with the “establishing shot” and goes from there. Learn more by checking out Josh’s video here. 03.25.2021

Which watches are best

When our Fitbit Charge 4 faded to black earlier in the week we were set to buy a watch better suited to our trail needs. A watch with GPS, a watch with mapping, a watch that hopefully could track key bits of information on our adventures. But which one? And which review to go by? Typically, we go to outdoorgearlab.com to help narrow the field, but their most recent review was from November 2019. We dismissed a couple other reviews because they neglected to mention the price, instead offering a link to Amazon to let you figure it out yourself. Then, we hit on the Treeline Review of “The Best Hiking Watches of 2020.” A year old and slightly out of date, true. But it didn’t mince words declaring its favorites, including “Best Hiking Watch” (Garmin Instinct), “Best Upgrade Hiking Watch” (Garmin fenix 6), “Best Budget Hiking Watch” (Suunto Ambit3 Peak) and “Best Hiking Watch Without GPS (Suunto Core).

Check out the review here. 04.02.2021