As you have probably noticed we had a fantastic time down in Moab visiting both Arches and Canyonlands National Parks. The area is absolutely amazing and full of beautiful places and natural wonders. There is so much to do though that it can be a little overwhelming, so for both parks I used the respective Chimani apps to help plan and carry out our adventures. I used the apps on a iPhone running iOS 9, but they are also available for Android.
App Organization
There are a bunch of different categories to help you out so it is suppose to be easy to find what you want to do. Unfortunately I was not always sure where different activities would show up, for example the line between auto touring and hiking is very blurred with some of the same locations showing up in both places. That confused me for a bit, but I guess it makes sense if it is an attraction that can both be hiked to and seen from a pullout or parking lot. If you are not sure what category a particular attraction or activity might be found under chances are that it is under multiple.You can also use the search feature if you want to find something specific.
Planning Your Trip
The best thing to do is just go look at the sections of things you like to do, in the case of these apps mostly hiking. When you find an activity that you want to do on your trip, or might want to do, just bookmark it by tapping the bookmark in the upper right hand corner of the details screen.
Now I’ll do you a favor and tell you where to find those bookmarks later, since it is not apparent from the app itself, in fact I did not figure it out until after we had already come home from Moab. From the Home screen tap the banner at the very top, the one that says the name of the park and shows your rank (normally scout). This will take you the “My Chimani” section of the app where one of the sections is “bookmarks.” This will make your trip much easier. Simply bookmark the activities that you want to do and then you will be able to easily find them while you are in the parks. This will prove useful when using the maps as well.
Maps in the App
You have to zoom in for individual places to appear and when you do you are so close that you can’t see it in relation to anything else.
For this reason I relied mostly on the park guide that the rangers give you when you come in for navigating.
Since the trip though I have figured out how to make the map portion much more usable, which is good since some National Parks are no longer handing out the park guides to save paper. In the settings section of the app (at the very bottom of the side menu) turn off cluster map pins.
Although this still is not perfect (it would be nice if you could set some filters) it is much more usable. If you have bookmarked any spot it will appear as a tan pin making those easier to find. I hope to see more improvements to Chimani’s maps in the future.
Also remember that you can download the maps to the app before you head out so that if you run into dead zones (you will) the map will still be available to you.