For years, I’ve been planning my trips using tools that were built for other people— for road cyclists, for hikers, for drivers. They can all handle gravel to some extent, but none of them assumes that anyone would be looking for a route that isn’t paved. In the end, I’d always end up sitting there and drawing a line by hand on the map because the route planner kept steering me back onto the paved road.
That’s exactly what DirtCompass is for. The first version is now online.
What you can do with it
Plan a tour. You place waypoints on the map, and the router calculates the route between them. Calculations are performed using BRouter on a dedicated server, using a profile designed for enduro: it seeks out field and forest trails, avoids major roads, and elevation gain doesn’t factor into the calculation. I’ve explained exactly how this works in a separate post.
Decide how to ride section by section. Hardly any route is off-road from start to finish. Each section between two waypoints therefore has its own mode—Offroad or Road—and is calculated accordingly. The connecting leg across open country uses the road profile; the rest is on the dirt. Here are a few settings: Avoid highways, avoid toll roads, avoid ferries, avoid wet conditions, avoid unpaved roads, and—deliberately turned off by default—include narrow trails.
See what you’ve gotten yourself into. Below the map is the elevation profile, colored according to gradient: the steeper the slope, the redder it is. When you zoom in on the map, the profile zooms in with it, along with the elevation axis— over 300 km, the relief is a straight line; over 3 km on the screen, it takes on a shape. Plus length, ascent, descent, estimated ride time, and the steepest climb of the tour.
And see what you’re riding on. The route is color-coded by surface type, based on OSM data for the paths: paved, unpaved, and gray for anything where it’s simply not been entered. That last point is more important than it sounds—for forest trails, this information is missing in the vast majority of cases, and I think it’s more honest to leave it gray than to make up a number. The percentage of “surface unknown” is therefore listed as a separate figure alongside the rest.
Bring your GPX files. Up to 25 MB, which is plenty even for large files—the Trans Euro Trail in France is 14 MB. If the file contains multiple tracks, DirtCompass asks which ones you want instead of creating 29 routes without asking. An imported tour can be opened in the planner and edited further, and its surface type is measured in the background. Of course, everything can also be exported again as GPX.
Manage your tours. Search, sort by date, name, length, or
elevation gain, add custom tags, duplicate, and each row displays a small image of the tour — with three files named “ TET_CH-05,” this is the
fastest way to find the right one. You can also reverse a route:
this creates a second route and recalculates the return trip, since—due to
one-way streets and no-turn restrictions—it’s not simply the outbound route in reverse.
An account that’s all yours. The overview shows your stats and a map with all the tours you’ve ridden or planned so far. In the settings: kilometers or miles, time zone, language, where a blank map opens, and which mode a new route planning starts in. You can download everything associated with your account as a ZIP file—the routes as GPX, since every other program can read that format. And you can delete the account at any time, immediately and without having to ask me.
The site is available in German and English.
What isn’t available yet
I’d rather write this down than have someone figure it out on their own:
- Sharing routes. There’s no link you can share yet, and no visibility setting other than “private.” That’s next on the list.
- Points from GPX files. Waypoints (
<wpt>) from imported files— gas stations, huts, bookmarked locations—aren’t imported yet. - An app. The interface for it is already in place, but the app itself isn’t.
What will deliberately not be included is a public catalog of third-party tours. That would turn the site into a community platform with everything that goes with it, and I’m the wrong person to run that.
A word that needs to be said
The route planner knows paths, not restrictions. Many trails, forest paths, and dirt roads are closed to motor vehicles, and whether this applies to a specific path is not indicated in the map data, nor can DirtCompass know it. A calculated route is a suggestion, not permission—it’s up to you to check this on-site and using common sense.
Let me know what’s broken
This is the first version, so there will be areas I haven’t yet noticed. If you notice anything—a route that doesn’t make sense, a file that won’t import, anything that feels off—let me know. It’s most helpful if you include where you started and where you were trying to go; that way I can recreate the issue.
And now: have fun out there.