Made a free browser tool that finds the exact mileage to any coordinate on a GPX track
I do a lot of waypoint work on long-distance routes and kept running into the same problem — I’ve got a GPX track loaded, and I need to know exactly how far along it a specific point falls. A water source, a campsite, a road crossing. Measuring it manually in CalTopo or Gaia every time got old.
So I built a small tool to do it. Load any GPX file, paste in coordinates, and it tells you the cumulative mileage from the track start to the nearest point on the line. You can run a bunch of coordinates in one session and export the whole thing as a CSV.
A few things that might matter to people here:
**•** It works with **any** GPX track, not tied to any specific trail
**•** Your file never leaves your browser — nothing gets uploaded to a server, it all runs locally
**•** It measures to the nearest point on the track ***line***, not just the nearest recorded track point, so the distances are accurate even on sparser tracks
**•** No login, no paywall, no app
Full disclosure: I run a hiking navigation site (Hiking America) and built this for my own waypoint work, then figured others could use it. It’s genuinely free — I’m not gating it behind anything.
Link: hikingamerica.com/trail-tools/gpx-distance-finder/
Happy to add features if there’s something that’d make it more useful for CDT planning specifically. What calculations do you all find yourself doing by hand?