Our Story & Mission
TrekGuard was born from a simple reality on Himalayan trails: standard navigation apps fail when temperatures drop below freezing, cell towers lose solar power, and oxygen levels decrease by half.
Origins
Most mainstream hiking and fitness apps are designed for suburban trailheads or well-connected national parks. In the Nepal Himalaya, you face steep granite gorges that obstruct satellite visibility, sub-zero nights that trigger voltage drops in phone batteries, and high-altitude health risks like Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS).
TrekGuard was created in Kathmandu by software engineer and mountain trekker Bikal Shrestha to give hikers, guides, and international travelers a purpose-built safety toolkit. From barometric altimeter filtering to Lake Louise symptom scoring and offline emergency SMS outboxes, every feature exists because the terrain demanded it - not because it demoed well.
The app is deliberately conservative about what it claims to know. When a GPS fix or barometric reading cannot be trusted, TrekGuard downgrades its confidence and suppresses altitude-derived warnings rather than showing a reassuring number that happens to be wrong. On a safety tool, a confident wrong answer is worse than an honest “unknown”.
Founder & Lead Engineer
“When you are ascending past 4,000 meters toward a high Himalayan pass, your phone should not be draining battery hunting for cell towers or asking for a cloud login. It should deliver reliable altitude, clear route tracking, and honest safety guidance - completely offline.”
Core Philosophy
We build tools that respect the physical realities of mountain environments and the privacy of the trekkers who carry them.
Himalayan river gorges block signals and remote solar towers drop out during storms. TrekGuard is engineered so your map packs, altitude, compass, GPX line, and emergency checklists function with zero cellular connectivity.
No mobile app can magically prevent acute mountain sickness or predict local rockfalls. TrekGuard provides validated Lake Louise AMS questionnaires and ascent alerts, while always emphasizing that local guides, lodge advice, and physical descent come first.
Your coordinates, photos, and trek recordings belong to you. TrekGuard stores your data locally on your device with no mandatory cloud logins and no invasive ad SDKs in the Play Store release.
Safety tools should never be locked behind a paywall when you are stranded above 4,000 meters. TrekGuard is published with all core tools unlocked with no subscription tiers.
By the numbers
Every figure below is verifiable in the Play Store release - no roadmap promises.
Field Validation
Himalayan trails break assumptions that hold at sea level. These three routes each exposed a different failure mode, and each one changed how TrekGuard works.
The Modi Khola approach is a deep, steep-walled gorge that cuts satellite visibility and degrades raw GPS altitude. This route drove the barometer-plus-GPS sensor fusion and the confidence scoring that suppresses altitude warnings when a fix cannot be trusted.
Kyanjin Gompa to Kyanjin Ri gains over a thousand meters in a single day. That profile shaped the ascent-rate warnings, the Lake Louise AMS prompts, and the cold-weather battery behavior the tracker has to survive overnight.
A remote Dolpa route where connectivity simply is not available. It is the reference case for full offline operation: pre-downloaded vector tiles, off-trail deviation alerts, and an emergency SMS outbox that queues undeliverable messages until signal returns.
The same sensor-fusion, acclimatization, and offline logic runs across all 33 Nepal trek routes in the app, and on custom routes worldwide once map packs are downloaded.
Spotted a GPX track that does not match the trail, found a bug in the Android app, or want to contribute route data? Corrections from people who have walked the route are the most useful feedback we get.
Planning a trek right now? Start with the high-altitude safety guide, check your itinerary against the acclimatization planner, or score symptoms with the Lake Louise AMS self-check.
Get it on Google Play
Download map packs on Wi‑Fi, pull weather while online, then use GPS altitude, planner & safety tools on trail - free on Google Play. Not a guide or rescue service.