Two days before the season is the wrong time to find out your map only remembers the screens you already looked at. Here is a forty-second test you can run right now, on whatever app is already on your phone.
The test
- At home, on wifi, download the area you plan to hunt.
- Turn on airplane mode.
- Open the map at your truck spot. It will look fine. Everyone passes this.
- Now pan one drainage over, to somewhere you never looked.
- Now zoom in two steps past where you stopped.
- Now turn on a layer you had switched off.
Steps 4, 5 and 6 are where apps fail. Grey squares. Blurry, upscaled pixels where the detail should be. A layer that simply does not appear. If you got any of those, the app did not download a map. It cached a picture of one.
Why apps fail it
Most apps store the map as raster tiles: flat images of the screens you already viewed, at the zoom levels you already used. Pictures do not survive panning somewhere new. Vector tiles are the underlying data — trail lines, contours, boundaries, names — and your phone draws the map from them, so anywhere inside the download renders at full detail whether or not you ever looked at it. The long version is in what "offline maps" actually means.
What passing looks like
The airplane-mode icon is showing. You pan into terrain you have never opened and it draws at full detail. You zoom in and the trail names and boundary lines stay sharp instead of turning into upscaled blur. You toggle on the hunt unit layer with no signal and the lines appear.
One honest limit, so you are not surprised by it: name search in our app asks the server, so it needs a connection. Everything drawn on the map does not.
What we cover, so you know whether your spot is in it
- 164,667 named trails and 399,659 miles of them
- 2,122 counties with published trail coverage, across 51 states and territories
- Hunt unit boundaries for 47 states plus every national wildlife refuge, and property parcels for 45 states
- Elevation from USGS 3DEP, hydrography from 3DHP, public-land boundaries from PAD-US, NOAA bathymetry and tides on the water
Those figures were recomputed on 2026-09-02 and are republished on every rebuild. The per-state and per-county breakdown is on the open data page, free to download under ODbL, so you can check your county before you trust us with it.
The three things to download before you leave signal
- The region, not the pin. Offline packs come out as area extracts, so take the whole drainage, not a circle around the trailhead. Pans across the edge of a small download are exactly where the grey squares live.
- The layers you will actually want at 5am. Hunt units, parcels, public land, rivers. Turn them on once at home so you know they are in the pack.
- On wifi, the night before. The archives are large because they are real data, not thumbnails.
One more, said plainly rather than discovered at the trailhead: sign in once while you still have signal. After that the app opens offline, with your packs, every time. It does not need to phone home to let you in.
The part that is not about maps
Live location sharing and the emergency location sheet are on the free tier, and they are the reason a lot of non-hunters run this test too. Before you go dark, share your live location with someone at home and set your emergency contacts. If the day goes wrong, the people who need to find you already have the map.
What it costs
The app is free to download. Offline maps, unlimited offline packs, hunt units and every safety feature are included. Property parcels with owner names and the premium terrain layers are Trailmonger Pro, $19.99 a year.
If your app passed the test, good — keep it. If it did not, the state pages on our site (Colorado, Montana, Texas, the rest) show what is in the pack for where you hunt, and the two companion posts cover the hunt unit lines and who owns the parcel on the far side of the fence.
Coverage figures from the live press page, recomputed 2026-09-02. Every layer's age is on the data freshness page.