Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Mass Formation | Peak Prosperity
Biden’s Trumpian Trade Policy by Dan Mitchell
For self-interested reasons, I obviously like my video on the merits of free trade and the downside of protectionism.
But now I’ll also be recommending this new video from Liberty International.
It has some great examples, such as Washington’s corrupt trade barriers to sugar (as well as other examples of foolish agriculture subsidy programs).
And there’s some excellent analysis of how developing nations are hurt by the double-edged sword of protectionism and foreign aid.
What happened to Haiti is especially tragic.
My only criticism (and this is a sin of omission) is that there wasn’t enough time to explain why people shouldn’t fixate on the trade deficit – which is, after all, simply the flip side of a capital surplus.
For purposes of today’s column, though, I want to focus more on the politics of trade rather than the economics of trade.
That’s because Trump and Biden are basically the Bobbsey Twins of protectionism.
In his New York Times column, Binyamin Appelbaum explains why Trump’s China tariffs backfired.
I obviously agree, but Appelbaum only mentions in passing that Biden has not done much to reverse that policy.
Tariffs on imports from China have refilled the employee parking lot at Stoughton Trailers in Evansville, Wis. …the rest of us are paying for those jobs. The tariffs have contributed to a shortage of chassis in the middle of an import boom, one reason that American ports are gridlocked.
Tariffs also drive up prices. American chassis are beginning to roll off production lines, but they cost more than pretariff Chinese chassis, which raises the price of everything that travels by chassis. …the government has decided to limit competition, a lazy approach that is both expensive and counterproductive. Taxing imports from China gives the appearance of punishing China, but the cost of the tariffs is paid by Americans. …Mr. Biden should make a clean break with Mr. Trump’s destructive tariffs. The right recipe is simple…, maintain an environment in which companies can flourish, ensure workers reap the benefits.
So at what point do Trump’s tariffs become Biden’s tariffs?
Technically, we hit that point in late January of 2021.
To make matters worse, Biden is also imposing new trade taxes on American consumers and businesses.
The Wall Street Journal opined today on Biden’s latest protectionist initiative.
President Biden says he feels your pain regarding inflation… Too bad his Administration’s policies reveal different priorities. Witness the Commerce Department’s decision to raise tariffs on lumber, which will raise building costs in an already strained housing market.
The Commerce Department said last week that it will double the average tariff on Canadian softwood lumber to 17.9% from 8.99%. …There’s rarely a good time for trade restrictions, but the timing of this one is tragicomical. The same month Commerce revealed its tariff plan, lumber hit a record price of $1,650 per thousand board-feet, more than three times the level before pandemic supply shortages began. …The Biden Administration’s tariff resumes the U.S.-Canada lumber war where President Trump left off. …President Biden campaigned against his predecessor’s tariffs, but his trade policy in office has been nearly as protectionist. He’s kept most tariffs in place.
Kept most in place…and now adding more.
This is very sad, particularly since I had hoped that was one area where Biden might actually move policy in the right direction.
No, I didn’t think Biden actually understood why free trade is good (he’s always been a proponent of bigger government, after all).
But I hoped he would do the right thing simply to show he was different than Trump. Those hopes have been dashed.
P.S. If you want more reasons to be concerned, Biden also hasn’t done much to resuscitate the World Trade Organization and he isn’t pushing back on his party’s embrace of carbon protectionism.
Daily Digest 11/30 -- UK Cutting Livestock Production to Save Rivers; NFTs Next Big Threat to Environment | Peak Prosperity
The Narratives Fail by James Howard Kunstler
"Inevitably, it will be here. The question is will we be prepared for it?”
— Dr. Fauci on Omicron
Does it finally look like Dr. Anthony Fauci is trying to carry out an assisted suicide of the United States? On the Sunday Morning TV chat circuit, the White House Covid-19 czar (a.k.a. The Science) declared that the new Omicron variant is “a clarion call” to get people vaccinated. Is that so, Dr. Fauci? Considering how well your “vaccines” work? And how many people have been maimed and killed by their side-effects? (More than all other vaccines combined over the past thirty years.) And how you knavishly outlawed effective and cheap early treatment protocols that would have put Covid-19 down by June of 2020 (and saved half-a-million lives). The Science also called on Sunday for the general re-masking of the public and averred to the possibility of more lockdowns ahead. And just at Christmas-time, you understand. What a nose this rascal has for politics!
Senator Ted Cruz (TX) called for the Department of Justice to prosecute The Science for lying to Congress, which The Science smugly laughed off, perhaps knowing that his world-beating, maliciously incompetent leadership in the Coronavirus saga would end up incriminating and delegitimizing the entire corrupt, Pharma-captured US public health bureaucracy, with collateral damage everywhere else in government — and therefore that no authority in the land would dare to swear him under oath in a court-of-law. Or so he may think for now.
Meanwhile, Virologist Barry Schoub, Chairman of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 Vaccines, declared the new Omicron Coronavirus “mild.” Could it be that the whole hoary Covid-19 narrative is falling apart now? Could Dr. Fauci and his sleazy associates in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO, the Big Pharma C-suites, the grifting university research labs, the despicable social media combine, and yet more sinister outfits such as the CIA and the WEF — might this unholy host of villains and fixers find themselves on-the-run? And might Omicron represent for them some final grasp at the last straw of narrative control?
It’s pretty clear that citizens of the liberal democracies are fed up with being pushed around, jabbed, driven out of business, lied-to, gaslighted, and deprived of their livelihoods. They increasingly can’t believe any of the bullshit issued by the medical establishment and its political hand-maidens, and why should they? The countries with the highest vaccination rates also happen to be the ones with the highest Covid cases. Countries with low vaccination rates and widespread use of early treatment with common drugs have low Covid cases. Two weeks after Japan okayed the use of Ivermectin in mid-November of this year, cases fell from a big surge down to near zero. What part of that is complicated?
The people are out in the streets all over the world now. They have only begun to express their rage at the Covid narrative-driven new fashion for tyrannical government — government not of, for, and by the people, but over, on top of, and in spite of them. In Austria, an opéra bouffe toyland suddenly inflamed with Nazi-style strong-arming of its own citizens, the cops and the army may be switching their allegiance away from the government to the folks moiling in the streets. This is exactly the kind of country and the type of situation where governments fall. And when Austria goes down, others will follow.
Next door, outgoing German health minister, Jens Spahn, issued a warning that by the end of winter “pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, recovered or dead.” Was that supposed to be reassuring? Somewhere out in the universe’s recurve of time, the spirit of Dr. Josef Mengele is doing an end-zone dance. Down in Australia two frisky teens called in a threat to behead the premier (i.e., governor) of West Australia (capital: Perth). The world is suddenly remembering the back-story behind the old political phrase heads will roll, namely, what happens to the folks-in-charge when they piss-off enough of the people whose affairs they are responsible for running.
More to the point, to understand what is happening in America, just catch a glimpse of what has happened. By 2019, a rogue faction of bureaucrats was bent on shoving President Donald Trump off the game-board at all costs. Trump had become the fixed object of every anxiety neurosis that afflicted the thinking-governing-and-chattering classes. Conveniently, China also needed to get rid of Mr. Trump, for interfering with their plans to dominate the planet.
The Trump years were the narrative-formation years, as one plot after another, with their rafts of cockamamie stories — RussiaGate, UkraineGate, TaxGate — was hatched and then elaborated by the worker bees in Cable News and the WashPo / New York Times nexus. Imagine their frustration that those gambits failed. But all that narrative-shaping prepared them for the kill-shot when China gifted the world with Covid-19 (Dr. Anthony Fauci acting as midwife in the delivery). Dr. Fauci then went straight to work turning the splendid opportunity of the pandemic into history’s all-time greatest mindfuck. He did everything possible to prevent public health from controlling the disease, and then foisted on the terrorized public a set of dangerous, untested, gene-therapy treatments that he enjoyed a share of the profits in. His criminal acts have been revealed and fully documented and now he will fall. Wait for it.
The Covid-19 mindfuck worked to distract the country’s attention from the activities of characters like Lawfare avatar Marc Elias of the DNC’s Perkins Coie law firm and Marc Zuckerberg of Facebook, going all around the swing states in 2020 with sacks full of money, arranging election procedures such as mass mail-in voting with no voter ID to facilitate the victory of the obviously non compos mentis empty shell of “Joe Biden”. That did work. Just what the country needed, too, at this perilous moment of history: a fake head-of-state. The people mostly played along for two years until very lately, seeing at last how they have been robbed of their health, their wealth, their future, and very likely their children’s futures. Watch them now as they turn on the ones who made all that happen.
Germany Falls Completely to Davos by Tom Luongo
If anyone was under any illusions that Germany wasn’t completely under the control of the Davos Crowd then I think this article from Politico should burn that perception into your retinas.
The article details what’s in the new German government’s agreement between the parties. It lays out the goals of the coalition as well as the roadmap for its policy priorities.
In short, this is literally a laundry list of everything Davos has been demanding and it ensures the complete neutering or submission of the FDP’s Christian Lindner to the Davos agenda.
I’m not going to go through them all point by point, the Politico article does that well enough.
What’s important here is that in light of the media release of OmicronVID-9/11 that the new German government is keen on serving its Davos masters agenda fully. Even though OmicronVID-9/11 looks to be the mildest and least interesting strain of COVID-9/11 that isn’t deterring European governments from announcing enforced vaccination programs, including from Germany’s new, fragile coalition.
This tweet confirms that Lindner fully caved here. New Chancellor Olaf Scholz and a majority of state Presidents are pushing this legislation into the Bundestag as I write.
Sadly, no one should really be surprised by this. While I hoped Lindner would be the thorn in Davos’ side in Germany, it doesn’t look that way at all. This cave was presaged by the ‘retirement’ of uber monetary hawk, Jens Wiedmann, as President of the Bundesbank ‘to spend time with his family.’
Yeah, pull the other one Jens, it plays “Jingle Bells.”
The best Lindner can do under the circumstances is slow the roll out of this but he won’t do it now unless this compulsory vaccination program pushes through the Bundestag and is deeply unpopular with German voters.
But, back to the coalition agreement. This is a document that reads like a German takeover of the entire continent. And I guess that was the bribe offered the FDP to go along with this.
On the surface it cements the idea that Germany is in charge of the EU’s evolution from a collection of independent states into a full political and fiscal union which supersedes all national government considerations. But, at the same time it will further erode any sovereignty left in Germany, as well as any other EU member state.
Davos is clear about what the plan here is, full evolution of the EU into a transnational bureaucratic superstate with zero direct accountability of its leadership to the people.
Expecting this coalition to back down, for example, on “Rule-of-Law” issues with Poland and Hungary is a fantasy. If anything, now Berlin is giving Brussels a blank check to go after these two countries harder than ever.
And the clincher to that argument is in these two provisions highlighted below:
More broadly, the three parties set the highly ambitious goal of changing the EU’s treaties. The deal says the ongoing Conference on the Future of Europe — a discussion forum for possible EU reforms — “should lead to a constitutional convention and the further development of a federal European state.” That stance won’t go down well in some other EU capitals like Warsaw or Budapest, which would likely veto any such moves.
On foreign policy and defense, the treaty demands a reform of the EU’s foreign policy division, the European External Action Service. And it pushes the EU to move away from requiring unanimity for all foreign policy moves — a barrier the bloc has struggled to overcome on basic matters like issuing statements on China’s crackdown in Hong Kong.
Moreover, to sell this transformation into a depraved technocracy, the Germans will push for more direct democratic ‘elections’ across the entire bloc to decide on leadership within the European Commission. Look everyone! Democracy!
This is simply a stalking horse for getting further political integration as the national governments still control who represents them on the Commission. Since, as we’ve seen time and again, Davos and the EU are in full control of the party apparatuses in each major country and the people’s loyalty so split up across five to seven parties in each of these countries, elections themselves are a complete joke since the coalitions that end up ruling look nothing like what the majority of the people actually voted for, c.f. Italy, Chechia, Austria.
Davos controls the governing coalitions in every country other than Hungary and Poland. This is an illusion of more democracy and furthering ‘European values’ while cementing total control within the Brussels bureaucracy.
The most insidious thing in the document to me is Germany’s call for ending unanimity within the European Council on foreign policy matters. This is where both Hungary and Poland have been able to fight off the worst advances by Brussels for years and retain some semblance of independence.
By holding EU foreign policy hostage multiple times in recent years, both countries have been able to slow down and/or force course corrections onto Brussels while retaining some semblance of their autonomy. These have been attrition moves by Prime Ministers Orban and Morawiecki hoping to outlast the EU while popular uprisings against Brussels matured.
But Poland has repeatedly betrayed its Visigrad neighbors with its virulent Russophobia which the Eurocrats and the British have used time and again to their advantage. The Poles continue to play footsie trying to play the EU off Russia to get what they want, but all that ends up happening is they bind themselves tighter in the EU’s geopolitical Chinese finger trap while alienating the Russians even further.
If the Germans are able to push this through, by the complete rewriting of the European Treaties as advocated by this coalition agreement, then during their time in office they will have completed the transformation of the EU into the EUSSR for all intents and purposes.
This agreement is worse than any version I could have expected given the FDP’s involvement in this. The pressure on Lindner must be immense and he likely went along with this, like many, hoping he can at least slow this down by withholding the purse strings.
With AfD not rallying into the September elections, there simply wasn’t the political will to oppose what is happening at this point. That may change in 2022 as things progress from here so German polling will bear very close scrutiny.
That said, I suspect this agreement will go down very well with German voters as it looks like one in which Germany’s power within the EU, which they are still overwhelmingly in favor of, expands greatly.
Notice, however, how quickly Olaf Scholz, the new Chancellor, after rejecting Merkel’s call for new lockdowns over COVID-19 last week and looking surprisingly independent, changed course with the release of OmicronVID-9/11 this week.
In the end, this is close to the government Davos wanted. The FDP can still be a wildcard here depending on how the polls in Germany shift over the next six months. But it looks pretty obvious at this point there is no will to move against the Davos agenda of crashing the European economy and destroying capital formation absent a full takeover of EU institutions first.
The dangerous buildup of tensions in Ukraine with Russia over the breakaway republics of the Donbass is inextricably linked to this shift in Germany’s governance. As are the wranglings over the Nordstream 2 pipeline, which the Scholz government is in favor of.
As always, the EU and Davos want Russia as their energy supplier but as a vassal not as a partner. If anyone is using Nordstream 2 as a political tool over the rest of Europe it is Germany, not Russia, as they will control the distribution of gas internally after Nordstream 2 is live, not Russia.
They will use that as a cudgel to get through many of these policy prescriptions. I am still convinced that Nordstream 2 will be live, delivering gas soon. It may take further negotiations to get it done but it will happen. Don’t discount Germany leaking the letter to the U.S. Congress lobbying them not to further sanction the pipeline because it will do irreparable damage to U.S./German relations.
Whether morons like Ted Cruz (R-TX) finally get this or not is still unknown. With the power vacuum at the top of the U.S. political system, where the Neocon Flying Monkeys are being allowed to bring us to the brink of a NATO war with Russia over Ukraine, all bets are off as to what happens next.
I still feel a real sovereign debt crisis is on the horizon and with FOMC Chair Jerome Powell putting the final nail in the coffin of the “transitory inflation” narrative, it’s clear that the U.S. political faction hostile to selling the country out to Obama and Davos are winning.
And because of this the new German coalition staking their flag in the ground saying, “if EU integration is going to happen, it’s going to happen somewhat on terms we control,” may actually be too little, too late.
Lindner may not be privy to everything going on here either. If he isn’t aware of the nuances at play it may explain why he went along with this insanity. Once he, like Powell and a few others here in the U.S., get a sense of what’s really going on, what the real plan is, he may pull out of this coalition during the height of the debt crisis in2022.
In fact, a collapse of this government could be the catalyst for the very debt crisis we’ve been preparing for.
But for now, I’d consider Germany Davos Occupied Territory completely and Germany as an economic powerhouse of any import a thing of the recent past.
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Being Thankful Is the Path to Victory Over Davos by Tom Luongo
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It is the one day where we celebrate putting aside our differences and doing the most basic thing humans can do together, share a meal.
It is also the one holiday that does nothing to aggrandize The State in all its rotten guises. For that alone it would be my personal favorite. Ultimately this is just a story about two very different people coming together to share the fruits of the harvest and the hunt to begin the long and difficult process of building trust.
Trust, by the way, is the basis for civilization itself. Without trust there is nothing, just The Hunger Games.
It doesn’t matter whether the stories of the first Thanksgiving are true or not. Only those with an obsession with demystifying the world to salve their own inner emptiness care about such historical ‘truths.’
It is the story itself that has power, like all great stories.
It’s a story that is deeply embedded in the Myth of America as the great experiment in governance and rebellion against the colonial powers of Europe.
In the end, that Myth is just that, of course, a myth.
America’s history is much more nuanced and complex, darker and lighter than the foundations of that Myth care to admit. I’m not here to white, brown or even greenwash America’s history any more than an honest British, Italian, Russian, or Chinese person would do to their own.
I’m here to discuss why it is we should be thankful for even having a world where such Myths can even exist.
Of course history is messy. It’s violent and, at times, horrific. Yes, some people suck. Wars happened and will happen. Genocides committed and are yet to be committed.
The big stories we all thrill to on our screens today big and small try to help us navigate what happens when people go mad in groups, lose their sense of propriety and humility, and become obsessed with their own fears at the expense of their empathy.
This is what a breakdown of trust leads to, a loss of civilization.
We live in a time where those in power show their bottomless disdain for humanity by only focusing on those bad parts of it. It’s now grown to even dissing this one American tradition that is one of the last honest lessons for a world spiraling out of control.
Because that is what Thanksgiving is all about. Taking a time out from the harsh reality of existence and being thankful for what you have, not envious of or wistful for what you don’t.
To listen to the race-baiting, soulless apparatchiks screeching about how we should turn Thanksgiving into yet another opportunity to distrust each other before eating a meal devoid of nutrition, i.e. the turkey, desperately imploring us to keep up barriers between family members over COVID is revealing more of their sickness than anyone else’s.
These are people without hope or faith in anything. They are fallen, power-hungry zombies consumed with self-importance painting on a face of empathy while extolling medical apartheid and scapegoating the unvaxxed to fuel their hatred.
These are humanity’s enemies, not a virus with a 0.1% mortality rate or those brave enough to face it without the help of Big Brother.
And yet, we should even be thankful for them.
Because without them as a counter-example, we have no way to gauge our own behavior. We have no mirror to look into and see our own tendencies towards ugliness. Because without that ability to see first hand what it is we do not want to be, we become as lost in our own fugue of self-importance which justifies any amount of violence as they are.
I don’t hate the Joy Ann Reids and the Jenn Psakis of this world. I celebrate their depravity because without them there can be no opportunity to point out just how insane the world they advocate is.
Peaking Duck
Last week I speculated that we had reached Peak Davos. I’m surprised to report that I got a lot less push back from that article than I was expecting.
Right on cue, the morning after our annual celebration of common decency and reconnection with our deracinated families, we are bombarded with a new variant of COVID to bludgeon us with.
On the thinnest trading day of the year in the U.S., when most of us are nursing epic carb hangovers while doomscrolling through our Twitter feeds and trolling Amazon for the best deals on a bunch of shit we know in our hearts we don’t need, they trot out the fear porn nuclear barrage.
The Dow? Down 1119.00 points.
Oil? Down $9.31 per barrel.
Bitcoin? Down $5200, nearly 10%
If you thought you could escape Davos‘ Great Reset, think again. Everything you have will be theirs. Everything you desire — family, home, stability, hope — is subject to their approval. Pay no attention to the timing, the virology, or the logic. Just ab-react in real time to a wholly manufactured farce which if you watched it as a movie after Thanksgiving dinner, you’d shut off for being too contrived.
Honestly, at this point they really should hire some better writers because this movie sucks worse than Captain Marvel did.
The ‘Nu’ variant, or NuVID for short, is evolving so fast even its name had to be quickly changed to Omicron to keep us confused. Is it the Nu variant? or Omicron? People will now spend hours of their lives being corrected about what the name of this thing is so midwits can make themselves feel more informed than their mouth-breathing, unvaxxed brethren they still hate.
We don’t know anything about NuVID than it has evolved multiple new spike proteins and whatever else the gods of virology deign to tell us about it.
Even though we know next to nothing of either the virulence or transmissibility of NuVID, the first response from the usual suspects is to ramp up talk of further locking down populations all over Europe. The world was beginning to get back to some semblance of normal but now everyone is flapping their wings in panic like my ducks do when the dogs hear a noise in the woods and start barking.
We’d faced down our worst fears and were beginning to work through the supply chain issues, the backlogs of paperwork, and had adjusted to new workflows and schedules. Those that stood in opposition to the vaccine mandates wouldn’t be budged from their positions anymore and their protests not televised.
Vaccine distribution centers were shutting down, people were assuming the risk of living, finding sources of ivermectin and HCQ to treat themselves while the Medical Industrial Complex kept trying to get in their way.
And so our reward for being thankful for mostly feeling like we’d gotten through this terrible ordeal — the hysteria over the virus, not the virus itself — was to be threatened again with more of the same.
And, again, I am thankful for this. Because this latest round of fear porn is the most obvious, the most over-the-top, the crudest attempt at psychological warfare Davos has engaged in yet.
That makes it easy to look at and laugh.
But this doesn’t matter to those in charge. If we laugh at them and their seriousness become even more incensed.
They could see their bonds slipping and people getting back to normal. They could see the same massive protests around the world outside their seats of power that I’ve seen and knew it was time to play their next, even more desperate card.
The only thing that I’m even remotely afraid of at this point are the people who still need to believe in all of this.
And yet, we should still be thankful for the confirmation of our knowing they have been lying to us about all of this the entire time.
This will be my last attempt to try to get through to the fearful again. Cases aren’t hospitalizations. And hospitalizations aren’t a death sentence. With the mountain of evidence out there that none of the numbers we’ve been given about COVID were ever accurate why do you think we should believe anything about NuVID?
Trust Should be a Four-Letter Word
It gets back to that basic building block of civilization itself. Trust.
Without it the Pilgrims and the Native Americans couldn’t have sat down around the table together. Without it the Pilgrims wouldn’t have even been able to cross the Atlantic in the first place, or hired the boat that brought them there. Without trust that boat would still have been a glint in the eye of the person dreaming of building it, since it was a project far grander than his meager allotment of time on this planet would have been able to complete.
Davos says it is motivated by a desire to save humanity from itself. It has deemed our civilization unworthy of them and their grand ideas and like angry gods are in the process of wiping it clean from the earth to Build it Back Better, in their image, not ours.
But that idea cannot become real unless we lend it credence, unless we, like them become consumed with the things we’ve lost and will never have rather than embrace that which is in front of us. Civilization isn’t some esoteric thing that can be conjured up by speaking magic words from a mass communications device.
Civilization comes from looking another person in the eye, shaking their hand and making an agreement which both sides honor to the best of their ability.
For a critical mass of people in the West, their trust in the institutions that governed them is gone. It is never coming back.
And without that trust there can be no going back to the old system where Davos moved pieces on the board and we reacted to them within the rules of the game because we thought the rules reinforced civilization.
But we know now that too, is a lie. And for that I am eternally thankful to Davos. Because without their Quixotic and, unfortunately, deadly quest to remake humanity so many people would have never woken up to the reality of their existence.
That’s the reason why I’m more convinced today than before that we’ve reached Peak Davos because today I’m thankful for knowing the community of people ready to take that next first step across the divide and form new bonds of trust which will power the next myths capable of sustaining a better civilization.
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Monday, November 29, 2021
Montana Motor Stables: Inflation in the Weimar Republic
Montana Motor Stables: Inflation
5 Outdoor Apps Every Adventurer Should Have on Their Phone by Kraig Becker
A smartphone is one of the handiest tools you can have with you when traveling or exploring the backcountry. As long as you can keep your phone charged, it is an indispensable tool for staying in communication, checking weather reports, listening to music, and snapping photos. But add a few third-party apps to your device, and you can extend its functionality even further. With that in mind, here are five outdoor apps that every adventurer should be using.
Gaia GPS
Gaia GPS is essentially Google Maps for the trail. This app takes over where other mapping programs stop being useful, helping backpackers, day hikers, and overlanders find their way while off the grid. The service offers downloadable topo and satellite maps from around the world and uses your phone’s built-in GPS functionality to help you find your way. Additional features include integrated NOAA weather forecasts, historical wildfire locations, backroads maps for Canada, and layers that display where hunting is allowed. Users can sign up for free and get limited downloadable content. A premium membership grants unlimited access to the Gaia maps database. (Download for iOS and Android)
AllTrails
Another maps app, AllTrails, is an excellent resource for day hikers looking for options wherever they go. The beauty of this app is that it has a very active community that constantly provides insights, updates, and ratings for trekking routes of various lengths from across the globe. In fact, AllTrails has more than 200,000 trails logged in its database, allowing users to search for hikes based on location, quality, length, and other criteria. And if you have a question about a particular trail, you can ask the community to get more information. Other features include the ability to record GPS tracks on the map, save your favorite hikes, share them online. The app is free to use with limited functionality. A paid AllTrails Pro account provides offline maps, turn-by-turn navigation, and other handy features. (Download for iOS and Android)
PeakVisor
A great app for climbers, hikers, and mountaineers, PeakVisor uses GPS and augmented reality to locate and name nearby mountains. Users simply fire up the app, point it at a mountain, and the peak’s name—along with its altitude—is displayed on the screen. The service works worldwide, and an internet connection is not needed as all data can be downloaded and stored on your device. The software is reportedly capable of identifying more than 1 million mountains and can also name huts, castles, and other structures as well. A 3D compass and altimeter are also part of the package, assisting with navigation duties while on an adventure. As with other outdoor apps, PeakVisor offers a free tier that limits functionality, with a “pro” option that unlocks more features. (Download for iOS and Android)
Need to find a place to pitch your tent or park your RV? The Dyrt has you covered. This app provides the location of more than 1 million campsites across the U.S., with user ratings, photos, and handy filters to make searching easier. Users will find helpful information on nearly every national and state park in the country, with helpful navigation to find specific campgrounds near your current location. A premium tier offers additional functionality, including a trip planner, free camping maps, and offline access to the Dyrt’s database. (Download for iOS and Android)
MTN Hub
Another community-driven outdoor app, MTN Hub, is a place for outdoor adventurers to share their experiences. The app includes integrated maps on which users can drop pins to indicate poor weather conditions, wildlife encounters, forest fires, and other important information. The software also allows the user to track their GPS coordinates and record their backcountry experiences, then create a 3D map of their entire journey to share with others. There is even a feature that shares climate data with researchers to collect more information on temperature and snow conditions in the mountains. (Download for iOS and Android)