AdvOSM Adventure Road Maps
For motorcycles, 4x4s, SUVs, cars, and walkers. For on-road and off-road. For Garmin, Basecamp, OruxMaps, and QmapShack. 160 countries. Updated frequently. Free.
AdvOSM maps analyze OSM data to reveal paved roads, unpaved roads, service roads open to motor vehicles, tracks open to motor vehicles, tracks and service roads closed to motor vehicles, track grades, surface warnings, narrow roads, ford crossings, weir crossings, protected areas, footpaths, and steep terrain as contour lines. The lines and icons are designed for high visibility on a sunlit GPS screen.
Most maps show roads colored by their category: motorway, primary, tertiary, residential, unclassified, service, track, etc., whether they are smooth asphalt, broken concrete, graded gravel, rutted dirt, sandy riverbed, too narrow to pass or turn, or closed. Yet surface information matters for safety and planning, especially when alone where cellphones don’t work.
AdvOSM maps let adventurers choose challenging but safe unpaved roads and tracks by looking at the map on the screen, offline, informed of surface type, smoothness, grade, width and accessibility wherever this information is in OSM. The maps also let routes be planned in Garmin Basecamp (free) that can be exported as GPX files to cellphone apps for navigation.
The USA, Australia, and Canada maps include overlays of the Trans America, Trans Australia, and Trans Canada Trails. These are shown as outlines so the road type isn't covered. The Trail websites offer downloads of GPX files that can be followed in a GPS together with these maps.
Examples
Here, half the highway and nearby road is unpaved, and surfaces are "very bad to horrible." Yet other maps don't show this:
The same area as above, zoomed out:
Compare with AlternativasLibres Map:
Cripple Creek, Colorado USA:
Compare with GmapTool Map:
Dobrich, Bulgaria:
Compare with Freizeitkarte:
El Carmen, Argentina:
Compare with OpenMapChest:
Kakumbi, Zambia:
Compare with UserBeam Map:
Harrowgate, England:
Compare with OpenTopoMap:
Jindabyne, Australia:
Compare with Bushwalk Map:
Kalahari, Namibia:
Compare with BBBike Map:
Lastly, for an urban evaluation, San Francisco at maximum and normal detail:
Compare with Garmin's TopoActive PowerSports Map—the lines and icons are far less informative:
Road Legend
A Motorway.
B Primary Road. Paved.
C Secondary Road. Paved.
D Tertiary Road. Paved.
E Minor, Residential, or Unclassified Road. Paved.
1 Unpaved Road. Includes unpaved parts of all classes of roads except service roads. Intended for traffic.
2 Track or unpaved service road. Not intended for traffic.
3 Track or service road closed to motor vehicles or motorcycles.
4 Service Road, paved or untagged. Includes alleys and driveways. Not intended for traffic. May have restrictions.
5 Trail or footpath not intended or permitted for vehicles.
6 Protected area with restrictions, such as national park, nature reserve, managed habitat, wildlife sanctuary, hunting area.
7 Trans America, Trans Australia, and Trans Canada Trails outline.
Surface Legend
S2 Intermediate surface; pavement repairs with small cracks, holes, or ruts; or compacted earth with shallow holes and ruts for over 2 km.
S3 Poor to bad surface; rough pavement with cracks, holes, or ruts; or uncompacted earth with holes, ruts for over 1 km.
S4 Very bad to horrible surface; pavement with deep cracks, holes, and ruts; or loose earth with rocks, deep ruts for over 500m.
S5 Very horrible to impassable surface; pavement with ruts, rocks, and obstacles; or earth with deep ruts, rocks, and obstacles for over 500m.
G2 Degraded pavement or gravel track with sand and clay for over 2 km.
G3 Mixed soft and hard surface track for over 1 km.
G4 Soft soil and grass track with some hard material for over 500m.
G5 Soil and grass track without hard material for over 500m.
N2 Narrow road with width 3m or less for over 2 km, or only one lane for two directions for over 2 km.
N3 Narrow road with width 2m or less for over 1 km.
N4 Narrow road with width 1m or less for over 1 km.
Ford Level stream or river crossing on gravel or earth, depending on season and weather.
Weir Reservoir or canal crossing on concrete. Road may be underwater and have steep embankments.
Surface warnings are searchable. If you enjoy deep ruts, rocks, and obstacles, search for “S5:” Several maps can be loaded into a Garmin with seamless interconnection with turn-by-turn navigation and auto-rerouting across the maps.
Maps Download
To download, click a server:
A folder will open with the list of maps. Click on the map name to download the map. Download one map at a time. If you select two or more, the files will be zipped into one very large file, which takes more time and makes the download more likely to fail. Maps take a few minutes to download over WiFi but can take an hour over mobile. (The "Downloads" number means the count since the last update.)
The images below describe each map. Red lines show the coverage. Purple lines show the trails. To download a map and legend, click a server above.
AdvOSM USA
USA West (2300 MB)
USA Central (2400 MB)
USA East (2300 MB)
AdvOSM Europe
Europe A: Andorra, France, Monaco, Portugal, Spain (3600B)
Europe B: Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands (3400 MB)
Europe C: Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Liechtenstein, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland (2700 MB)
Europe D: Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Kosovo, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Turkey (3200 MB)
Europe E: Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Guernsey-Jersey, Iceland, Ireland, Isle-of-Man, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom (3700 MB)
AdvOSM Canada + Alaska
(3500 MB)
AdvOSM Mexico + Central America
Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama (1000 MB)
AdvOSM South America
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela (3500 MB)
AdvOSM Africa
Africa A: Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Gambia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia (3200 MB)
Africa B: Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Congo Democratic Republic, Congo Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe (3000 MB)
AdvOSM Middle East
Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, UAE, Yemen (1200 MB)
AdvOSM South Asia
Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (2700 MB)
AdvOSM Silk Road Asia
China, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia plus the adjacent border regions of Afghanistan, India, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey (3300 MB)
AdvOSM Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia Mainland: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, West Malaysia, Singapore (1300 MB)
Southeast Asia Island: Philippines, Indonesia, Timor-Leste, East Malaysia, Brunei (1900 MB)
AdvOSM Australia + New Zealand
(950 MB)
To use the maps in a Garmin GPS, download your maps (IMG files) into your PC. Connect your PC to your Garmin using a USB cable, or remove the microSD from your Garmin and connect it to your PC with a USB adapter. Copy your maps into the “Garmin” folder in the root directory of the microSD card. In a few models, this folder is named “Map”. Enable the maps in “Setup—Map Selection” of the Garmin menu. Most Garmins show each map as two or three maps in the selection screen: the lowest is the base map; the next is the contour map; the highest, if there are three, is the Trans [Country] Trail overlay map. In rural areas, set “Map Detail” to Maximum. In cities, you might need to use Minimum.
To use the map in Basecamp you must have a removable memory device (an SD card or a USB thumb drive or a Garmin GPS with a microSD card inside it) attached to the PC. Basecamp will not open maps from a hard disk, only from removable media, nor will it open them by clicking on the IMG file in Windows File Explorer. Create a folder named “Garmin” in the root directory of the removable medium and copy the IMG file into it. Basecamp will see the map automatically when it starts.
To use the map in OruxMaps on iPhone, download the maps from this website directly into your iPhone. Use the Apple Files to locate your map files, usually in the "Downloads" folder. Long-press the file and select Copy. Navigate to "On My iPhone > OruxMaps (or wherever OruxMaps is installed) > mapfiles." Long-press inside that folder and select Paste. Open the OruxMaps app. Tap the Map icon in the top right corner. Select Switch Map. Tap the Offline tab. Tap the Refresh button (double arrow) to ensure OruxMaps detects the new file. Find your map and tap it to load.
To use the maps in OruxMaps on Android, download your maps from this website into your PC. Connect your PC to your phone using a USB cable. Use Windows File Explorer to copy your downloaded map files from your PC into this Android folder: "[Your PC Name]/[Your Phone Name]/Internal shared storage/Android/data/com.orux.oruxmapsDonate/files/oruxmaps/mapfiles/". In OruxMaps, go to the Configuration page, and your maps will be listed. Select a map. If the screen goes blank, it is because OruxMaps thinks it is in a different part of the world than your map, in which case zoom out to the world map, drag your location to your map region, and zoom back in.
Note: These maps work (show roads and calculate routes) on any Garmin GPS made in the last 20 years but the quality of the rendering depends on the model. A general-purpose 2008 Oregon has complete functionality, like Basecamp. A special-purpose 2022 Zumo XT, ironically for motorcycles, draws thin lines and cannot display points of interest at maximum detail, even though they are searchable and routable. Unpaved roads can be seen from the line type but the surface warnings and amenities such as fuel are invisible, except for up to three categories as "Up Ahead" searches.
These OSM features are possible thanks to the volunteers who traveled these roads and tagged them in OSM. Please help by uploading corrections and descriptions to OSM, too.