Trip planner

Help guide · Updated June 25, 2026

What this is. The Trip planner turns "I'm driving from A to B over four days, where should I camp and what should I do" into a workable plan. Set an origin and destination, pick a corridor width either side of the route, hit Find stuff, and Campound surfaces every campground, trail, and route within that corridor — filtered against your dates for availability. Save the ones you like to the trip's Shortlist, then navigate it.

Open the planner

Tap the Trip planner button in the toolbar — the luggage / itinerary icon between Layers and Find a spot.

Trip planner dialog with two tabs (Trips, Detail), an empty state showing a suitcase icon, the message 'No trips yet. Start one to plan a route + shortlist campgrounds along the way.', and a blue '+ Start a new trip' button. — The empty state. You can have multiple trips at once — different routes, different date ranges, different shortlists.

Tap + Start a new trip and you land on the Detail tab with a fresh trip ("Trip 1") waiting for an origin.

Origin and destination

Type a place name into Origin. Campound queries Mapbox for matches and shows an autocomplete dropdown — pick the one you mean.

Origin field with 'Denver, CO' typed and a single autocomplete suggestion below it: 'Denver, Colorado, United States'. — Origin autocomplete. Repeat for Destination.

Once both fields are set, Campound draws a driving route between them on the map (using Mapbox directions) and shows the total distance and drive time inline.

Detail view with Origin = Denver, Colorado, United States and Destination = Crested Butte, Colorado, United States. Below the destination: '229 mi · 4h 24m driving'. From/To date fields still empty. Corridor 15 mi. Find stuff still disabled. — Route calculated: **229 mi · 4h 24m driving**. The blue line on the map underneath traces the route; the corridor extends out from it on both sides.

Dates and corridor

Two more knobs decide what counts as "along the way":

From / To — the date range of your trip. Campsites get checked against Recreation.gov for availability across these dates; sites with no nights available are filtered out.
Corridor — the search width either side of the route, in miles. Default 15. Bump it up to surface destinations farther off-line; drop it down when there are too many results to think about.

Hit Find stuff (the button activates once origin, destination, and dates are all set). Campound scans the corridor for everything interesting and groups the results into tabs:

Tab	What's in it
Campgrounds	Recreation.gov facilities within the corridor, filtered by date availability. Sorted by where they fall along the route.
Trails & routes	National Forest trails and vehicle routes within the corridor — places to hike, ride, or drive while you're in the area.
My spots	Points you've already drawn or imported that happen to fall in the corridor. Useful if you've been collecting waypoints for years.
My routes	Same idea for lines — trails or roads you've recorded or imported.
Shortlist	The items you've saved to this trip. Persists across Find stuff re-runs.

Build the Shortlist

The Shortlist is the heart of the planner — it's the curated set of campgrounds and routes you actually plan to use on this trip, as opposed to the raw search results. From any result row in the other tabs, tap the rosette icon to add it to the Shortlist.

The benefits of shortlisting:

Saved with the trip. Close the planner, come back tomorrow, your shortlist is still there. (Synced across devices if you're signed in.)
Stays even if Find stuff is re-run. Tightening the corridor or shifting your dates won't drop your favorites — they just get marked "still in range" or "no longer in range."
One-tap navigate. The Shortlist tab knows the order you want to hit places in; the Navigate action runs a multi-stop trip through them.

Multiple trips

The + button next to the trip name creates a new trip alongside the current one — same dialog, different route, separate shortlist. The dropdown to the left switches between them.

This is useful when:

You're considering two different routes ("if we go via Aspen vs. via I-70") and want both sketched out.
You have a long-term backlog (summer trip, fall trip, next-year-when-the-kids-are-older trip) and want to keep each one alive without losing the other.
You're a guide or trip leader and you're managing multiple groups' plans at once.

The Trips tab at the top gives you the list of every trip you've created, with the trip name and origin/destination summary.

The action buttons

Button	What it does
Navigate this trip (triangle)	Starts a multi-stop turn-by-turn navigation session that runs through the trip — origin, each shortlisted stop in order, destination. Same off-paved + watch + CarPlay behavior as single-destination navigation. Disabled until the trip has a destination or shortlist.
Rename trip (✎)	Change the trip's display name. The default is "Trip 1" / "Trip 2" / etc.; renaming to something meaningful ("Telluride loop", "Wind Rivers June") makes the dropdown easier to scan.
New trip (+)	Spin up a new empty trip alongside the current one. The new one becomes active automatically.
Delete trip (trash)	Remove the active trip and everything in its shortlist. Confirmation required.

Tips

Start wide, narrow down. Set the corridor to 30 mi for the first Find stuff pass — it surfaces options you wouldn't have thought of. Once you've shortlisted the keepers, drop the corridor to 5 mi to declutter the map.

Find stuff needs signal. Campsite availability is queried live against Recreation.gov; the route comes from Mapbox. Offline, the planner can show the trip you already built and shortlist — but it can't re-run the search.

Multiple trips compare nicely. Make "Route A" and "Route B" as two separate trips and flip between them in the dropdown. The map updates each time, so it's a quick way to see which path actually has more campgrounds nearby.

Shortlist survives a re-search. Pulling your dates left or right doesn't drop favorited items — it just labels the ones now outside the corridor as such. Useful when you're still flexing the trip's edges.