Take each day's GPX up the mountain

With Organic Maps, you can see where you are with no signal at all.

Why one file per day

This site's GPX is one file per day, with numbered waypoints inside each.

It's not for tidiness. An ETA for the whole route was never going to be reliable anyway — no app knows you'll spend twenty minutes at the summit, or half an hour photographing a meadow. The gap between waypoints is short enough that error doesn't accumulate, and you reset your watch at every point.

So the real use on the mountain is: how far to the next point, not how long until the very end.

Step 1: download the offline map first

Skip this and there's no map on the mountain. Finding out only after you've lost signal is too late.

Open Organic Maps and find Download Maps: on iPhone it is in the bottom-right menu under “Map Style & Layers”; on Android it is in the bottom-right ☰ menu.

The three blocks below are examples using trips on this site: Nepal is the EBC and Gokyo Lakes trek, Tanzania is Kilimanjaro. Going somewhere else, look up that country in the same list — it's organised by country, and larger countries are split into regions, so you only download the block you need.

• Taiwan splits into two blocks, 360.9 MB total (North 183.1 MB, South 177.8 MB). the 100 Peaks span both, so download both.
• Nepal splits into four blocks. EBC is in the east — downloading “Eastern Region” at 107.3 MB is enough; add “Kathmandu” (49.6 MB) if you need to navigate within the city. All blocks total 390.8 MB.
• Tanzania splits into seven blocks. Kilimanjaro is in “Northern Region”, 104.6 MB. All blocks total 689.9 MB.

Download on home Wi-Fi, then before you leave, switch on Airplane Mode and open the app to confirm the map still renders. Once that's confirmed, the rest of the trip needs no network at all.

Three layer toggles are worth turning on: Hiking, Contours, Alpine. With them on, trails and contour lines both draw, and the terrain reads far more clearly. On Android the layers sit behind the stacked-squares icon at the top left (“Map Style & Layers”, in the same row as Subway and Cycling) — not in the same menu as Download Maps; on iPhone both are in the menu you just opened.

Step 2: get the GPX into the app

Menu wording varies from phone to phone; go by what your own phone shows.

GPX import is only supported from the June 2023 release onward. Older installs only accept KML/KMZ, and the import will fail silently — update before importing.

iPhone (Safari): after downloading, a down arrow appears next to the address bar — tap it to see the file you just downloaded. If you miss it, the file is still in the Files app's Downloads folder, ready whenever you go back for it.

In the Files app, press and hold the file → “Open With” → choose Organic Maps.

iPhone with Chrome: the “…” menu at the bottom right has “Downloads” — the file's there.

Android (Chrome): tapping the link downloads it straight away and a Download complete notification appears; tap the notification to choose which app opens it. Without notification permission for Chrome there is no notification — then find it under Chrome's “⋮” menu → “Downloads”, or your phone's Files app under Download.

Tapping the file brings up a chooser — find Organic Maps by name: it may sit third the first time and jump to the front once you have used it, so go by name, not position. Then tap “Just once” or “Always”.

The first launch of Organic Maps asks for location permission. That is unrelated to importing — the GPX loads either way.

On success you'll see “Bookmarks loaded! You can find them on the map or in bookmark manager.” On Android this is a toast that disappears after about two seconds — missing it does not mean it failed; just check “Bookmarks & Tracks” as described next.

After that it's in the app's “Bookmarks & Tracks”, named after the file, with something like “7 bookmarks, 1 track” underneath — bookmarks are the waypoints, the track is that day's route. Import once and it stays — no need to redo it before the next hike.

To import a whole trip at once: unzip the file, then in the app go “Bookmarks & Tracks” → “Import Bookmarks & Tracks” → pick that folder. On Android this opens the system folder picker, which will not let you pick the phone's root folder (you get “Can't use this folder”) — go into the subfolder the files are actually in, such as Download, then tap “Use this folder”.

Reading it on the mountain

That day's route appears on the map in blue, with numbered waypoints. Your position is a dot on the map — no signal needed, GPS and network are two separate things.

The thing you'll do most on the mountain isn't calculating time — it's checking you're still on the line.

Tap the blue line itself (not a waypoint) to see that day's total length, total time, ascent, descent, highest and lowest point, and a draggable elevation profile. Tapping a waypoint only gives you that one point's info, not any of this.

To estimate time: tap the next numbered waypoint → “Route to”. It gives distance, ETA, ascent/descent and a profile. Repeat at each point as you go.

To check how far a specific stretch is: tap one waypoint and choose “Route from here”, then tap another and choose “Route to here” — with both ends set it computes that stretch. Nanhu Day 02 from New Yun Ling Mountain Hut to Wuyanfeng comes out to 4.9 km, 3 h 46 min, 976 m ascent. Handy for planning at home too.

Waypoints carry trail conditions — this site writes cautions right into the waypoint names, so tapping the point in the app shows the warning in full, no need to check the website. Even the whole-trip notice travels with the file.

⚠️ The orange line isn't ours

The orange route drawn after tapping “Route to” is recomputed by the app over OpenStreetMap, not the track you imported. Most of the time the two coincide, so it looks the same.

When the two lines clearly diverge, follow the blue one.

The blue line has been walked. The orange one hasn't — it's computed from map data, and map data can be wrong or incomplete. Some stretches simply aren't in OpenStreetMap yet, so the app detours or fails to route — that isn't a problem with the GPX.

A few numbers easy to misread

• The distance next to a bookmark is straight-line, measured from where you currently are — not the distance along the trail. From Taichung, a Nanhu waypoint might read eighty-something kilometres; that isn't the day's mileage. For the along-trail distance, use the trick above: set “Route from here” and “Route to here” on both ends.
• The app's total time runs longer than this site's. The app shows elapsed time — first point to last, including every minute spent resting, taking photos, or standing at a summit. This site's “about N hours” on each card is moving time, with stops over 10 minutes already excluded. 南二段 Day 03 is 12 h 44 min in the app against about 10.7 h here — both are correct, they measure different things.
• The app's elevation differing from this site's is normal. The app uses the GPX's raw GPS elevation directly; this site's numbers are corrected against on-site signs and official data, so a difference of a few tens of metres is common. Trust this site's number where there's a sign; the shape of the profile is the same either way.

A few other things

• Battery: running GPS the whole day drains it fast — bring a power bank.
• Position and elevation jump around for the first few minutes after starting up — that's GPS still acquiring a fix, not you going the wrong way.
• Offline maps carry no real-time conditions — closures, landslides, dried-up water sources won't show.

About this app

Organic Maps has no ads, no tracking, no in-app purchases, no paid tier, and needs no account; its code is open source under Apache 2.0. It runs on donations and grants from NLnet and Mozilla.

Their own donation page says current donations fall well short of what development needs, and most of the cost has so far come out of the founders' own pockets. There's a “Donate” option right in the app's menu.

Incidentally, every trail, every campsite and junction coordinate on this site — including the layer used to correct elevation — comes from OpenStreetMap contributors: the same unpaid mappers who make it possible for Organic Maps to draw trails in Taiwan, Nepal and Tanzania.

Organic Maps also has a 2025 community fork called CoMaps, started by former contributors over a governance disagreement, with similar features. Either works with this site's GPX.

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