Getting Started

Welcome to Lodestone

Lodestone is your all-in-one backpacking and outdoor trip planner. Whether you're planning a weekend dayhike or a week-long thru-hike, Lodestone helps you organize every detail - from gear and loadouts to routes and group coordination.

Creating Your Account

Getting started is quick:

1. Sign up at lodestonehikes.com/register or download the iOS app
2. Complete your profile — add your name, a photo, and your preferred unit system (imperial or metric)
3. Start exploring — you're ready to create trips, add gear, and join groups

Key Concepts

Trips

A trip is the core of Lodestone. Each trip has:

• A name, dates, and location
• A route with waypoints and navigation
• A gear loadout (the gear that you're bringing)
• A provision kit (the food and fuel that you're bringing)
• ...and any friends you want to bring along the way

Gear

Your gear library is your personal inventory of all your outdoor equipment. Add items with details like weight, category, and brand. Once your gear is cataloged, you can quickly build loadouts for any trip.

Loadouts

A loadout is a curated list of gear for a specific trip or activity. Think of it as your packing list. You can:

• Create loadouts from your gear locker
• Share loadouts with friends via public links
• Duplicate and customize loadouts for different conditions

Loadouts are the primary tool for grouping together gear. For example, you can have a loadout that's as simple as for what you would take with you on a day hike - trail runners, a sling, and a nalgene. Or you can have a loadout for when you spend a week mountaineering.

Adding Gear to a Loadout

Gear is kept in your gear library. If you're a pro member, you can take a picture of a piece of your gear and Lodestone will use AI to automatically calculate the gears weight, brand, etc and then load it into your library. Otherwise, you can enter those details manually and manage your gear that way. Either way, the library serves as the centralized location for what you own.

When you want to add a piece of gear to a loadout, just click the plus button on the loadout screen and select the gear from the gear library.

Duplicating a Loadout

NOTE: Duplicating a loadout is a pro feature.

If you need to create a loadout that is very similar to another one, then you are able to copy that loadout via the duplicate loadout button. This will create a new loadout that references all of the gear of the original.

Trip Analysis

NOTE: Trip analysis is a pro feature.

When you do an AI analysis of a trip, Lodestone will take into account your loadout and tell you if you're packed appropriately for the trip that you're going on. For example, if you are bringing jogging shorts and a dream on the PCT then Lodestone's trip analysis will tell you that you're woefully underprepared and will suggest to you what you should bring with you on your trip whether it's a sleeping pad or shelter.

The trip analysis will also tell you if your loadouts is appropriate for the temperature and weather. If your sleeping bag isn't warm enough, then Lodestone will tell you.

Provision Kits

Provision kits are similar to loadouts except that they track consumables. Food, fuel, hydration, etc. They're separate from loadouts so that you can build meal plans that can be applied to one trip or another. For example, you can have a weekend dayhike provision kit that just contains some trail mix. Or you can have enough provisions for three days - which would potentiallly include some freeze dried meals and some fuel canisters.

Adding Provisions

Provisions and gear can both be added to your gear library - your gear library contains both. You can also use your phone to scan in food by taking a picture of it. Lodestone will be able to detect what kind of food you're adding and calculate the calories.

Trip Analysis

NOTE: Trip analysis is a pro feature.

When you ask Lodestone to do an AI powered analysis of your trip, it will consider the activity that you're doing and the amount of calories that you're bringing and tell you if you're bringing too much or too little food.

Weight and Loadout History

Each loadout has a history of what provision kits were used with it. That way you have a ledger of your meal plans for each trip you went on.

Additionally, when you have a loadout and a provision kit attached to a trip the weight is aggregated; you can see what your provisions weigh, what the loadout weighs, and what the combined total weighs.

Routes

Routes are what you use to navigate. There are two ways to create routes:

• The route planner on Lodestone
• Importing a GPX file from another platform

Route Planner

The route planner is a simple, built in planner that allows you to create your own route. For now, it's only available on the web. To get started, you navigate to the planner and simply click on where you want to start - I.E, a trailhead, a parking log, or your backyard. You then click where you want to go and Lodestone will automatically route the path.

Import

I'm going to be honest, Lodestone doesn't have a lot of catalogued routes/trails. If you want to import a trail from Komoot or Alltrails, then you can export a map file from those platforms and import it into Lodestone. Lodestone will happily accept a GPX route file and attach it to a trip.

Unfortunately, for now, importing a GPX file is only something you can do at the trip level; you cannot create Lodestone routes from exported trails/routes from other platforms.

Groups

Groups bring hikers together. Create or join a group to:

• Share trips and routes with members
• Coordinate group expeditions
• Stay connected with your hiking community

What's Next?

Now that you know the basics, dive deeper:

• Planning a Trip — Step-by-step trip creation guide
• Managing Gear — Organize your gear locker and build loadouts