The Story
Why GoraAdv exists, how it works, and what it can't do.
The problem
If you've tried to plan a serious offroad route before, you know the drill. Open a map. Stare at it for a while. Try to guess which roads are gravel by zooming in on satellite. Export a GPX. Load it into your device. Realise halfway through the first day that two sections are motorway. Start over.
Most route planners are built for roads. They avoid dirt. They route you around the interesting parts. If you want to stay off tarmac, you're either spending your evenings manually stitching together tracks, or paying for tools that still make you do half the work yourself.
GoraAdv flips the logic. Tarmac is the last resort — not the default. You set a start and end point. It finds the most offroad path between them automatically.
Honest limitations
The short answer: the map doesn't always have a better option.
GoraAdv routes on OpenStreetMap data — the same community-built map used by most navigation tools. OSM is remarkable for offroad detail in many regions, but it's not complete or uniform everywhere. Some areas have every forest track mapped. Others have nothing between the main roads.
When dirt tracks simply don't exist in the data between your two points, the algorithm falls back to the next best option — paved back roads, then minor roads, then whatever gets you there. It's not giving up. It's working with what the map knows about that region.
This also means results vary a lot by country and region. Spain and Montenegro have dense offroad coverage. A route through central France on a quiet Tuesday will look very different from one through the Pyrenees.
The terrain breakdown in the results panel is your best tool here. Check the offroad percentage before you commit. If it's lower than you'd expect, try adjusting your start or end point — sometimes moving a few kilometres opens up a completely different set of tracks.
Planning further
Running out of fuel on a remote mountain track is a different kind of problem than it is on a motorway. There's no hard shoulder, no passing traffic, and sometimes no phone signal. The fuel range marker exists so you can see exactly where your tank runs dry on the planned route — before you leave.
Multi-day planning applies the same idea to full expeditions. Instead of planning each day separately and hoping the legs connect, you plan the whole trip as one route. GoraAdv places day markers along it so you know roughly where each day ends. Where you actually sleep is up to you — the marker just tells you where to start looking.
Coming next: per-leg GPX export — download each day as a separate file. Large GPX files can silently fail or load incorrectly on some GPS devices and apps. Splitting by day keeps files small and clean, with the same tier limits applied per leg.
Also live: rest stop markers. Set an interval — every 80 km, every 120 km, whatever works for you — and GoraAdv places markers along the route at those points. It sounds simple. But when you're deep in a good stretch of track you stop noticing time, and four hours later you're running on empty in a way that has nothing to do with the fuel tank. A marker on the map is a reminder that exists before you need it.
The goal is simple: leave home with a complete picture of what the ride looks like, not a rough sketch you're improvising around once you're out there.
Behind the project
GoraAdv is a one-person project. No team, no investors, no roadmap decided by a committee. Just a rider who got frustrated enough with the existing options to build something different.
That means things move at the pace of one person's evenings and weekends. It also means decisions get made based on what actually matters for riding — not what looks good in a product deck.
GoraAdv is in alpha. Routes will improve. Coverage will grow. Some things are rough around the edges right now and I know exactly which ones. If something's broken or wrong, tell me directly — it goes straight to the person who can fix it.
If you want to support what's being built here, a coffee helps more than you'd think ☕.