Plan mountain training
properly

Create an account first — everything you plan is tied to it and syncs to your phone.

1. 1.1

   Go to app.milmap.nl and create an account with your email address, or sign in with Apple. Confirm the verification email: without it, a free account is blocked after 24 hours.

2. 1.2

   Then install the MilMap app on your phone (iOS or Android) and log in with the same account. Everything you plan on the laptop is on your device in the field.

A map is your working folder: everything for one exercise or one area lives in it.

1. 2.1

   Open Maps and create a new map. Give it a name you will recognise in the field — the area and the week, for example: "Hardangervidda – wk 12".

2. 2.2

   Pick your base map. For mountain terrain you work on a topographic base with contour lines; satellite goes alongside it to spot vegetation, snowfields and boulder fields.

3. 2.3

   Download the area offline before you leave. There is no coverage in the mountains, and a map that has not been cached is a blank map.

Draw the route the way you are going to walk it — not the way it is shortest on paper.

1. 3.1

   Place your route points in order: start point, decision points along the way, end point. MilMap calculates the distance, the height difference and a walking time for every leg.

2. 3.2

   Work in legs, not in one long line. A leg ends on a feature you can recognise: a saddle, a stream crossing, a ridge, a hut. That way you can tick off and adjust leg by leg.

3. 3.3

   Record your alternatives as separate routes: a bad-weather variant and a bail-out route to the nearest road or hut.

The mission is the plan around the map: who, when, and to what end.

1. 4.1

   Create a mission on your map and put your timeline in it: departure time, planned split times per leg, the latest turnaround time and the expected arrival.

2. 4.2

   Fill in the orders using the five paragraphs (SMEAC): situation, mission, execution, service support and command & signals. For mountain training, "service support" should at least hold your water, food and casualty-evacuation plan, and "command & signals" who you call and when you check in.

Waypoints are your decision points and your anchors — do not add too many, and not too few.

1. 5.1

   Put a waypoint on every point where you make a decision or where navigating gets hard: the entrance to a valley, a saddle, a river crossing, the change from trail to open ground.

2. 5.2

   Give every waypoint a short, unambiguous name and add the coordinate in MGRS, so you can fall back on the grid with map and compass.

3. 5.3

   Add photos to a waypoint — you recognise a picture of the stream crossing or the gate faster than a description. You can store up to three per waypoint.

4. 5.4

   Mark hazards separately: avalanche slopes, rockfall zones, fords that close up in the rain.

Already working in TopoGPS? Bring your existing routes and points along.

1. 6.1

   In TopoGPS, export your route or your points as a GPX file.

2. 6.2

   In MilMap, open the map it belongs to and use Import to upload the GPX file. Routes come in as a route, loose points as waypoints.

3. 6.3

   Check the import afterwards: names are not always carried over cleanly, and points called "WP 014" in TopoGPS deserve a real name here.

4. 6.4

   The same works with GPX from Garmin, Komoot or Google Earth (KML).

The best terrain study you can do without having been there.

1. 7.1

   Start the flyover on your route and let MilMap fly over it in 3D. You see the slopes, the valley cuts and the ridges the way they actually rise.

2. 7.2

   Watch for three things: where the route really steepens, where you lose sight of your next point, and where there is a way out downhill.

3. 7.3

   Run the flyover with your walking group before departure. Ten minutes of looking together saves a lot of discussion in the field.

Four overlays that turn an elevation map into a decision map — and save you picking apart contour lines by hand.

1. 8.1

   You find the module on the map under Mountain terrain: slope, aspect, avalanche terrain and water depth. You switch on one at a time, so the map stays readable.

2. 8.2

   Slope colours the gradient by degree. In practice: up to about 25° you still walk, 25–30° gets heavy and slippery, 30–45° is avalanche terrain, and above 45° you are talking about climbing, not walking.

3. 8.3

   Aspect shows which way a slope faces. North-facing slopes hold snow and ice far longer and are hard in the morning; south-facing slopes thaw earlier and then turn wet and muddy. For avalanche risk, the combination of aspect and wind direction is what matters.

4. 8.4

   Use the overlays together: a 35° north-facing slope after a day of fresh snow is exactly the terrain you want to route around, even if it is the shortest line on the flat map.

5. 8.5

   The biggest gain is speed. Normally you are counting contour lines and estimating the spacing between them to work out how steep a slope is — a few minutes per slope, and error-prone as soon as the lines sit close together. The overlay colours that same judgement across the whole area at a glance.

6. 8.6

   So within a minute you see which slopes drop out and which lines remain, and you keep your time for the real work: choosing the route, dividing it into legs and thinking through your variants.

Live weather on the points of your route, from Open-Meteo — plus precipitation radar and satellite imagery.

1. 9.1

   Open the Weather layer group and add weather locations — via a grid, an existing waypoint or a marked area. For each location MilMap pulls the current weather and the forecast from Open-Meteo: temperature, wind, precipitation and cloud cover. It refreshes roughly every two hours.

2. 9.2

   Put your weather locations on your decision points, not just on your start point. In the mountains the weather differs per valley and per altitude: between your car park at 800 metres and your saddle at 1,200 metres there is easily a few degrees and a wind force of difference.

3. 9.3

   The same layer group holds the precipitation radar (two hours back plus a short forecast) and a true-colour satellite image. With those you see whether a shower will hit your route and how the snow cover looked a few days ago.

4. 9.4

   Watch the wind on the high points and the freezing level in particular: that decides whether your crossing is frozen and firm or wet and slippery.

Paper does not run out of battery, freeze up or break. Assume your walking group is going without phones and print the route card for everyone.

1. 10.1

   Plan on the assumption that your walking group has no phone with them. On many exercises devices stay behind, or they fail from the cold or a flat battery. The printed route card is then not your backup but your only map — so everything you need has to be on it.

2. 10.2

   Export your route as a PDF on A4 and switch on what you actually use in the field: the map with your route, the leg table with bearings and times, your waypoints with their coordinate, the elevation profile and your bad-weather variant.

3. 10.3

   Leave the slope overlay off the print. On paper that colour layer makes the contour lines harder to read — use it on screen while planning.

4. 10.4

   Print on waterproof paper if you can. Fold the sheet to A5 with your first leg facing out and slide it into your map case, so along the way you only have to turn it over instead of unfolding it.

5. 10.5

   Give every member of the walking group their own copy — not one per group. If the group splits, everyone can carry on independently on bearing and back bearing. Put the turnaround time and the check-in moments on it in large type.

6. 10.6

   Before you leave, walk through the print once with your compass in hand: is the declination right, can you set the first bearing, are the grids legible? What you cannot find on paper you will not find in the field either.