About Adventure Mapper

An adventure's story belongs on a map

A map-first travel journal. First the route, the days and the small discoveries in between. And then publish a page anyone can wander through, past the parts you wrote down.

Join the waitlist Read the FAQ

Places: Everywhere you stopped
Days: What happened there
Spots: The small finds between

It started with my dad's hike

Jimmy, trail name Rocketman, with his arms raised behind the Katahdin summit sign on the Appalachian Trail — Rocketman 🚀 Katahdin, Maine Aug 17, 2022

Back in 2022, my dad, known on the trail as Rocketman 🚀, started his hike on the Appalachian Trail. It had always been a dream of his to hike the trail, and after a health scare in 2016, he decided to put that dream into action.

While he was training, we wanted to find a way for him to share updates from his hike with friends and family. So I, having just started a software engineering job and kind of knowing what I was doing, made him a site. And jimmyonthetrail.com was born.

It was a very basic site (and looking back now, wow, those designs were bad), but people kept telling me they were following my dad's progress and how cool it was to see where he was. Even though the site required manual updates every night and often went days without one (sorry, Dad…), it made me realize that this was something everyone should have.

It took another four years to build what I'd envisioned back then, but that was the beginning of Adventure Mapper.

Now Adventure Mapper lets you manage your own maps for your own travels. You can update your adventure as you live it to keep friends and family up to date, or simply live in the moment and create the map afterward. Either way, in the end you'll have a lasting recreation of your trip, exactly how you lived it.

The little café here, the rest day there, the circuitous route trying to find your hotel with no signal at 11 p.m. fiasco. It's all up to you to decide how to tell your own story, from backyard adventures to trips halfway across the world.

That's the beauty of Adventure Mapper.

I'll see you out there,

Jared

Adventurer, and maybe a future AT Thru-hiker?

The beginning, by the numbers

Days on the trail: 157; Days on the trail
The first site: 2022; The first site
Years in the making: 4; Years in the making

Rocketman's hike on the map · Coming soon

A travel journal where the map is the page

A trip is built from three things: the places you stopped, the days you spent there, and the spots you found in between. Stack them and you get one interactive page on the open web.

Every adventure has three layers: a landscape with a route and pins running across it, a week of days beneath it, and a row of small finds beneath that — labelled Places, Days and Spots — The three layers, in full

Places

Everywhere you stopped. Drop a pin and the route draws itself between them whether you took a train, walked, or just went for a long drive.

Days

What happened while you were there. Stay a week and each day gets its own page. Passing through? Skip days entirely.

Spots

The small things worth pinning: the viewpoint, the bakery, the swimming hole nobody signposted.

Built on geography, not a timeline

Most travel apps hand you a timeline. You post, the post scrolls away, and a year later the trip is a stack of images with no shape. Adventure Mapper starts from the geography instead. Every part of an adventure is attached to a real place, so the story has a structure that matches the way you actually moved through it.

Shaped by the trip

It works for a three-week bike tour, a weekend of camping, a single day in a new city, or a list of the best beaches on an island. The structure bends to the trip rather than the other way around.

Everyone knows how to read a map.

Maps are a language everyone already speaks. Point to a corner of the world you’ve never been to and it suddenly feels a little closer. You start to wonder what it would be like to stand there. Adventure Mapper grew out of that feeling.

Mission

Help people record their adventures in a way that inspires more of them.

Exploring the world, its people, and its places is the most important thing to me. A journal that just sits there does half the job. The other half is making you, or someone else, want to go.

Vision

A world map covered in first-hand adventures, route by route.

Every great route, from the Appalachian Trail to the Camino to the C&O Canal towpath, carrying the stories of the people who actually traveled it — so the next person plans their trip by being inspired by real ones.

One person went. Everyone else gets to look around.

Most travel tools are built for the person who went. Adventure Mapper is built for both sides of the trip, because the reader is the one who might go next.

If you went

A record that holds its shape

Everywhere you stopped, every day you stayed, every small find in between — in the order you lived it, on the map where it happened. Not a post that scrolls away. A page you can send to your family and open again in ten years.

If you're reading

Permission to wander off the route

The route is where the story went, not where the map ends. Follow it, then drift: the cove one headland over, the trail the writer never took, the town in the next valley. You'll find things the writer missed. Going to see them for yourself is the point.

An illustrated coastal route: a red line running between two pins, with dashed leaders out to five things just off it — stay for sunset, hike to the falls, wander the stalls, find the hidden cove, and get out on the water

What wandering looks like

If I went on this trip, I'd have checked this out.

That's the moment this was built for. Every trip has places the writer went past without ever mentioning them; a reader zooms out, spots one a half mile off the route, and starts planning a trip of their own. A photo feed can't give you that moment. An open map gives it to you all the time.

Zoom past the last pin
See what was nearby
Go take the trip

Questions

Frequently asked

What is Adventure Mapper?

Adventure Mapper is a map-first travel journal. You build a trip out of the places you stopped, the days you spent there, and the spots you found in between, and it publishes as an interactive map on its own public web page. Anyone with the link can follow the route, read the story, and explore the map beyond it.

Who makes Adventure Mapper?

Adventure Mapper is built by me, Jared Hood, a software engineer and adventurer. It started in 2022 when I built jimmyonthetrail.com so friends and family could follow my dad's Appalachian Trail hike. Four years later, that idea became Adventure Mapper. It's a one-person project for now, which means the same person writing the code is also answering the emails, obsessing over maps, and occasionally breaking things. Just like my dad taught me, we only test in production here.

Is Adventure Mapper free?

It's invite-only while we get it right, and free for everyone on the list. Once we go live there will be a generous free tier with a paid option as well — we have to keep the lights on somehow 🙂.

Do my friends need an account to see my trip?

No. Every published trip is a normal web page with its own link. Anyone can open it in a browser, with no app and no sign-up.

Can I map a trip I already took?

Yes. Drop in your photos and the ones with location data place themselves. Most people build a past trip faster than a live one.

Does it work for something that isn't a road trip?

Yes. A week in one city, a single day of wandering, or a guide with no dates at all, like the best beaches on an island.

Who owns my photos and writing?

You do. You can unpublish or delete a trip at any time and take your images with you.

Now get out there and explore!

Map your adventure as it happens, or piece it back together when you're home. Start with one pin and go from there.

Invite only

Get notified

Adventure Mapper is invite only while we're getting it right, so we're adding travelers a few at a time and reading what they make.

Leave your name and email and we'll send your invite the day the map opens. One email, nothing else.

Adventure Mapper is invite only while we're getting it right. Every trip that gets built teaches us something about the editor, the map, and the story view, so we're adding travelers a few at a time and reading what they make.

Leave your name and email and we'll send your invite the day the map opens to everyone. One email, nothing else.

Already have an invite? Start your first adventure