Overlanders leave the trailhead in a vehicle, not on foot — and the app you take with you needs to know MVUM codes, decode surface types, route across the actual off-road network, and keep working when the last cell tower drops out. Here's how Campound's features fit together for the drive out and back.
Get it on the App StoreCampound paints every square meter of the country with its PAD-US ownership: National Park (red), National Forest (green), BLM (tan), National Wilderness (dark green), state, local, tribal, private. A legend along the side of the map is toggleable — turn off Private if you only care about public access, or filter to just BLM if that's where you're headed. Every color decision is designed so a glance at the map tells you whose rules apply.
Wilderness is called out distinctly from the forest around it, because it changes what you can do — no motorized use, period. The color coding is the difference between "we can camp here" and "we absolutely cannot drive here." That matters more to overlanders than any other feature in the app.
Read the Layers guide →Every USFS Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) road and trail is tappable in Campound, and every symbol code — "9," "12," "1712" — gets decoded inline. So "9" reads as Trails open to motorcycles, Yearlong without you having to keep a USFS data dictionary in your glovebox. Same treatment for BLM routes: motorized-limited, motorized-open, non-motorized, non-mechanized all separately colored and toggleable.
Per-mode dates are decoded too: a road that closes for elk season shows its seasonal window inline ("Open to Motor vehicle: 06/01–09/30, Bicycle: Yearlong"), and a route with a per-vehicle-class restriction ("open to ATVs up to 50 inches") surfaces the class limit alongside the season.
The Vehicle-routes filter panel lets you toggle each publisher independently — NFS Roads, MVUM Roads, Federal-lands routes, BLM motorized-limited, and so on. When two datasets overlap the same road, you can flip one off to see the other unobstructed and understand which layer's telling you what.
Read the Trails & routes guide →Open the Trip planner and drop an origin and a destination. Campound draws the driving route and then searches every reservable campground within a corridor around that route — you set the corridor width. Availability comes back live from Recreation.gov for the dates you set, so a campground that's fully booked doesn't waste a row.
Each corridor match opens to its facility details: reviews, ratings, an availability calendar, and a deep-link to book on Recreation.gov. Shortlist the ones you're considering; delete the ones you're not; the shortlist syncs across your devices so your co-driver's iPad shows the same list you're building on your phone.
Read the Trip planner guide →The point-to-point Directions tool routes between two clicks anywhere on the map, including across the Forest Service, BLM, and OHV network. Under the hood it's a hybrid router: Mapbox handles the paved portion (the highway leg out of town), then Campound's own off-road router takes over across the unpaved network — reading the graph directly from the bundled PMTiles archives at full detail, so a zoomed-out view doesn't starve the routing of information.
A segmented control lets you pick Mixed (all layers, the default), Roads (roads and forest roads only), or Trails (trails only — for that one time you're wondering if a hiking connector exists between two roads you want to link). Each mode reruns the same query with a narrower graph so you can compare.
A Connectivity slider adjusts the router's willingness to bridge small gaps between publisher-separate segments — a common issue in USFS data where the same road is broken across ranger district boundaries. Nudge it up to force the router to connect what obviously belongs together; nudge it down when you want to see the actual raw connectivity.
Read the Navigation guide →Once the route's picked, tap Navigate and Campound gives you turn-by-turn voice, ETA, and drift-recalc across every leg — paved, forest road, and back to paved. Drive off-route because you saw a promising spur and it recalculates against the actual off-road network, not just the highway graph. Voice cues respect the surface change — "off-paved in 400 m" is a genuine hint that your driving style needs to change.
Android Auto is fully renderer'd — the whole Colorado vector stack ships to the car screen, DHU-verified on a Pixel 7 Pro. iOS CarPlay is scaffolded and waiting on Apple's final entitlement approval; when it lands, the same map will render on the car screen without any code changes on your end.
The Apple Watch mirrors the current maneuver, distance, and ETA — glance at your wrist for the next turn while your co-driver navigates from the phone. Turn-warn haptics buzz at the exact moment the 400 m threshold crosses.
Pull to the side, glance at your wrist, tap the crown to drop a waypoint. Pick the pin type from your dictionary — Dispersed camp, Hazard, Water source, Trailhead — dictate any note ("large clearing on the SE side, room for four rigs"), tap Done, keep driving. The point lands on the phone next to your other captures as a proper GeoJSON feature, ready to sync when you're back in range.
A disk-backed outbox guarantees every capture makes it to the phone — the watch keeps them locally and drains the queue whenever the Bluetooth link comes back. If you drop pins for 3 hours in a canyon with zero signal, all 3 hours of captures show up when you climb out.
Each pin type carries its own structured form: a Dispersed camp asks for site type, water, cell signal, vehicle clearance. Fill in what you know now; edit later when you're back at the trailhead with a real keyboard. The route dialog shows only the fields you filled in.
Read the Dictionary guide →The dictionary is yours to shape. Add a Recovery point type with a maroon icon for winch-out spots. Add a Spring type for reliable water. Add a Corner reflector for spots you've noticed the cell signal comes back. Every type gets its own icon, color, and per-type form (pick-one, pick-many, date, number, yes/no, text) so a Recovery point asks the questions that matter for a recovery point.
When My spots or My routes is turned on, a draggable legend lists every dictionary type with its swatch and icon — toggle each independently. Scan just your Recovery points, or just your Dispersed camps, without rerunning a search or losing context.
Tap the star on any campground, route, dispersed camp, or trail and it lands in your Favorites with a 1-to-5 rating. Favorites sync across your devices via your Campound account, so the dispersed camp you starred on your iPad is available on your phone before you head out. The Favorites list sorts by rating so your proven spots bubble to the top when you're picking next season's route.
Custom features and photos flow through the same sync. Anonymous captures work locally too — sign-in is optional. If you never want an account, everything just stays on-device.
Every layer we've discussed — land ownership, trails, forest roads, MVUM, BLM routes, campsite locations — ships as bundled PMTiles archives on your device. Download the states you're planning to spend time in from the Offline data screen and everything renders when the tower drops off. Offline auto-swaps the basemap to a computed coordinate grid so you keep your bearings even when the remote basemap can't load.
The trail finder works offline against the same tiles. Statewide name search works offline against a per-state index that downloads alongside the tiles. Point-to-point directions and the off-road router read the PMTiles directly, so they keep working past the last cell tower. Reservation lookups and the Trip planner corridor search need Wi-Fi to check Recreation.gov live availability — everything else keeps going.
Read the Offline data guide →Find the trail, follow it without cell service, and log the whole hike to Apple Fitness as a proper workout with route.
Search open nights on Recreation.gov, plan the drive around live availability, save the campgrounds you love.
All the features, all the personas, all in one map. Free. No account. Works offline.
Free. No account required. iPhone, iPad + Apple Watch. Android Auto renders too.
Campound