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Help
Getting Started
To draw a route, first single-click on the map several times to zooom in to the area of interest. Drag the map to pan. Once you've zoomed in close enough, single-clicking will add points to your route.
Turn the "Follow road" feature on (to draw along roads) or off (for example to draw a stretch of ocean swim) by selecting Settings/Follow road or Settings/Don't follow road.
Switch to metric units (or to U.S. units) by selecting Settings/Use metric or Settings/Use U.S. units
Features
Once you've drawn a route, you can:
- view an elevation profile plot by selecting Action/Plot elevation
- save the route on our server by selecting Action/Save route. A new window will open with a URL that you can use to bookmark or email the route.
- save the route on your own computer as a GPX file by selecting Action/Save as GPX. Note: we don't yet have the capability to read GPX files back into TopoRoute.
- delete the route (or the last piece of it) using Action/Clear route or Action/Undo. Note that Undo will only delete the last straight-line segment, which can be very short if you're using Follow Road.
Frequently Asked Questions
Zooming in from a map of the whole US every time I want to draw a local route is inconvenient. How can I avoid having to do this?
Draw and bookmark a route in your neighborhood. Then, when you want to draw a new route, return to this bookmark, clear the route, and begin drawing.
Why doesn't it plot the grade nor show cumulative climb data?
These quantities are difficult to calculate accurately unless the elevation data is completely free of noise. Because our elevation data contains noise, a ride along a flat beach-front path will look like it contains lots of little hills and valleys. If we were to calculate cumulative climb for a flat path, the calculated value would be erroneously large.
My route contains a lot of hills; why is the mean grade so small?
Mean grade is calculated as the difference between the end point elevation and the start point elevation, divided by the total length of the route. If your route ends at nearly the same elevation as it starts at (as it will for a loop, for example), the mean grade is close to zero.
Why do I get a data fetch error indicating that my route may be too long?
Very long routes put a heavy load on the server, so we limit the amount of elevation data your plot can request. If you have trouble or need a longer route, send us a link to your route, and if it looks like a reasonable route, we'll increase the limit. You won't have to redraw your route; once we increase the limit, you should be able to return to your bookmarked route and generate the plot.