How to plan a BDR trip
with GoraAdv.

GoraAdv is not affiliated with Backcountry Discovery Routes Inc. This article describes how to use GoraAdv as a planning tool alongside official BDR tracks downloaded from ridebdr.com.

What are the Backcountry Discovery Routes?

The Backcountry Discovery Routes, or BDR, are a series of free, expert-curated adventure motorcycle routes that cross individual U.S. states south to north — roughly 800 to 1,200 miles each, on a mix of forest service roads, BLM tracks, county dirt, and the occasional tarmac transfer. Each route is scouted, mapped and published by a non-profit working with land managers, then maintained as conditions change and detours appear.

You download the GPX file for a state from the official site. The line follows what the scouts judged to be the most rideable, scenic, dirt-priority way through that state — the result of months of fieldwork and dozens of road checks, condensed into one polyline you can ride.

Why is planning a BDR trip difficult?

A BDR file is, technically, a polyline. Several thousand latitude–longitude points strung together. That is what is in the file, and that is all that is in the file.

Where will you sleep on day three? Where is the next fuel stop after mile 180? When exactly does a day end — at a town, a campground, or just where your range runs out? Is there water on this stretch, or is it a hundred dry miles with no creek? None of that is encoded in the track. You have to figure it out separately, usually by squinting between the GPX and a satellite map and a fuel database, all in different tabs.

Most generic motorcycle route planners do not help. Their algorithms prefer paved roads and treat the BDR as a reference line drawn on top of the map — visible, but not actively routed. They show you that the BDR exists; they do not help you ride it.

So riders end up bouncing between tools. The BDR GPX opens in one app to follow the line. A mapping app in a second tab to scout a town for tonight's stage. A hotel or campground platform in a third for the booking. A fuel-station search somewhere else when the tank is the limiter. Then everything gets stitched back together by hand the night before, or — worse — at a crossroads with no signal. Each handoff between tools is a chance to lose detail, miss a constraint, or end up at mile 180 with no obvious place to sleep.

The other thing the raw GPX does not give you: any sense of what is actually under the wheels. A 200-mile BDR stage that is mostly graded gravel is a very different ride from the same distance through rocky two-track or sustained climbs at altitude. Without surface information you cannot accurately judge stage length until you are already on the bike — and by then it is too late to move tonight's stop.

A workflow that solves this

The fix is doing all of it in one place, before you leave. One map, one tool, every constraint visible at the same time — track, fuel, sleep, terrain, water — instead of stitched across half a dozen apps in the field. Here is the workflow.

Step one: download the route. Pick a state on ridebdr.com and grab the official GPX. If you want a longer trip, download adjacent state routes and chain them — many riders link two states for a two-week trip, or stitch a connector stage between routes that nearly meet at a border.

Step two: upload to GoraAdv. Open the planner, find the small "Have a GPX? Upload" link above the start point, drop your BDR file in. The track loads on the map exactly as it came from the source. Geometry preserved, no re-routing, no "improvements". This matters: the scouts picked that line for reasons that are not always obvious from a map.

Step three: split it into days. Set your maximum daily distance — 150 miles if it is your first long offroad week or you are riding above 9,000 feet, 250 if you are fit and the surface is fast. Day markers appear automatically along the track. Drag them to a town if the auto-position lands you in the middle of a national forest. The track is colour-coded by surface tier — dirt, gravel, unpaved road, paved, highway — all along the route, so you can scan tomorrow's section visually and shorten a day when you see it climbs into technical terrain.

Step four: find your stops. Click each day marker and search the area around it. Hotels, motels, campgrounds, food, ATMs, mechanics — everything within roughly 25 miles of each end-of-day point gets pulled in. Pick what fits your style and your budget. In the remote west, "what fits" is sometimes "the only one within 40 miles" — and now you know that before the sun starts dropping.

Step five: plan fuel. Tell the planner your range. It places markers on the route at the points where you will hit half a tank, ten percent, and empty. Fuel stations within a sensible radius around the ten-percent mark get surfaced. If the next station is 30 miles off-route on a paved spur, route through it and the rest of the day's fuel math recalculates. BDR routes regularly have 200-mile fuel gaps in the western states. Knowing about them on the laptop is much better than at mile 170.

Step six: heads-up on water. Where the BDR track crosses water — fords, low-water crossings, anything tagged in the underlying map data — you will see a marker on the line. The popup is a heads-up only; it cannot tell you whether the crossing is rideable today, because that depends on yesterday's weather and the season. Local check before you commit. Spring snowmelt in the high country can turn an ankle-deep summer crossing into a different problem entirely.

Step seven: download the enriched GPX. Same track you uploaded, plus your stops, day splits and waypoints, with metadata layered for whatever nav app or device you ride with. Load it on your phone or GPS, and ride.

What GoraAdv will not do for BDR

Three things, deliberately.

We do not host BDR tracks. Always download the official GPX from ridebdr.com. They are the source, and they keep their files current as roads close, detours open, and routes get re-scouted. A copy of a BDR track on a third-party site is by definition a stale track.

We do not re-route or "improve" your upload. The geometry you load stays exact. The scouts drew those lines for reasons we cannot see — a permission stretch here, a closed gate avoided there, a high-clearance detour that keeps the route legal for a 600-pound adventure bike. So when you upload a BDR track, we hand it back to you untouched. (For fresh routes you plan from scratch in the planner, the offroad-routing engine is the whole point — the upload flow is the deliberate exception.)

We do not replace the BDR project. GoraAdv is a planning tool that works on top of someone else's route. The route is the hard part, and the scouts and the volunteers do that work — and most of it is paid for by donations and merchandise sales rather than route fees.

Supporting the BDR project

The non-profit behind the routes funds the scouting, the mapping, the films and the guidebooks through donations, memberships and a small merchandise store. If a BDR track lets you ride somewhere you would not otherwise reach, it is worth giving back. The donate option lives on ridebdr.com directly. A few dollars a month from a few thousand riders keeps the project moving — and keeps the next state on the publication list.

A starting point for the next ride

The BDR is the most generous offroad-route project in the United States — thousands of miles of curated, dirt-priority adventure-bike routes, free, in your inbox the moment you ask. The hard part is no longer finding a route. It is turning that route into a trip you can actually ride this season, this week, with the fuel and the sleep and the time you have. That is what this workflow is for.