Charting the Course: Hiking America's Trail Tools
Long-distance hiking involves a lot of math. We are building Trail Tools to handle some of it for you starting with a free GPX Distance Finder that works entirely in your browser.
Every waypoint on the American Discovery Trail starts with the same question: how far along the route does this point fall? A water spigot in a Kansas city park. A post office counter in Ohio. Close to 10,000 of them now, and a waypoint without a mileage is worth very little to a hiker planning a day. I answered that question by hand for years, one point at a time, in a mapping tool.
Today, Hiking America is launching Trail Tools, a growing section of free browser-based planning tools for long-distance hikers and bikers. No account required, no data collected, nothing to download. Each one runs in your browser and does a single thing well.
The first tool is the GPX Distance Finder.
What It Does
Load any GPX track file and enter a set of coordinates — a campsite, a water source, a road crossing, a trailhead.
The tool finds the nearest point on your track to those coordinates and tells you exactly how far from the start of the route that point falls. Results appear instantly.
Run as many queries as you need, then export everything as a CSV.
Best of all –
- The GPX file never leaves your device.
- Nothing is sent to ANY server.
It's the same calculation you'd do manually with a mapping tool — just faster.
Why I Built It
The Great American Rail-Trail waypoints came in fast this spring, arriving as field notes while Bernie Krausse walked the route westbound. Every one needed a mileage before it reached a subscriber's map, and the notes came in faster than an evening of manual work could absorb. That layer is now built on 130 days of verification from the ground.
What's Coming Next
The GPX Distance Finder is the first tool in what I'm planning to grow into a full Trail Tools library. Tentative ideas on the board: a hiking pace and completion calculator, a resupply interval planner, a pack weight tracker, and more. Each one will be free, browser-based, and built around the specific planning questions long-distance hikers actually face.
If there's a calculation you find yourself doing repeatedly while planning a long route, I'd like to know about it. – john@hikingamerica.com
Try It Now
The GPX Distance Finder is live.
So is the Trail Tools section where new tools will be added as they're built.
Both are free. No login, no strings.
If you're planning the American Discovery Trail or the Great American Rail-Trail, the trail-specific navigation resources are at hikingamerica.com
- Free GPS tracks for the Great American,
- Comprehensive navigation for the American Discovery Trail.
Hike Your Hike - John. 🥾