How to Build a GPX Route for Bikepacking: Create, Edit, Split and Merge

How to Make a GPX File for Bikepacking, and the One Thing That Trips People Up

A GPX file is a plain text document written in XML — you can open one in a text editor and read it. To make a GPX file for bikepacking you draw a line in a route planner, export it as GPX, and copy it to a bike computer or phone. Ten minutes of work. The expensive part is not knowing what kind of line you exported.

Almost every bikepacking route you download is a track: a dense breadcrumb of recorded points with no turn instructions attached. A route is a sparse list of points a device navigates between, deriving the turns itself. Both live inside a .gpx file and behave completely differently on a handlebar. That mismatch is why a file that looks perfect on the map gives no turn guidance on the road.

Splitting, merging, reversing, cleaning up somebody else's file — all of it gets easier once you can tell which of the two you are holding. Still deciding where to ride? Start with our guide to planning a bikepacking route.

Track vs Route vs Waypoint: The Distinction Nobody Explains

GPX is an XML file format for storing coordinate data, and it holds waypoints, tracks and routes, per the OpenStreetMap wiki. Three containers, one file extension — the root of the confusion.

The GPX 1.1 schema documentation is precise about it. A route (rte) is "an ordered list of waypoints representing a series of turn points leading to a destination." A track (trk) is "an ordered list of points describing a path," subdivided into track segments (trkseg) that each hold "a list of Track Points which are logically connected in order." A waypoint (wpt) "represents a waypoint, point of interest, or named feature on a map."

Here is a track, trimmed to three points, with illustrative coordinates:

<trk>
  <name>day-1-of-4</name>
  <trkseg>
    <trkpt lat="44.100000" lon="-121.500000"><ele>1210.4</ele></trkpt>
    <trkpt lat="44.100120" lon="-121.499710"><ele>1211.9</ele></trkpt>
    <trkpt lat="44.100260" lon="-121.499380"><ele>1213.1</ele></trkpt>
  </trkseg>
</trk>

Three points, and you have moved about the length of a driveway. A multi-day route holds tens of thousands of them. A route element does the same job with a fraction of the data:

<rte>
  <name>example-route</name>
  <rtept lat="44.100000" lon="-121.500000"><name>Trailhead</name></rtept>
  <rtept lat="44.140000" lon="-121.430000"><name>Forest road junction</name></rtept>
</rte>

From the same schema: ele and time are optional, carrying minOccurs="0". A perfectly valid GPX can arrive with no elevation and no timestamps — remember that next time a planner says your ride has zero climbing.

Why your bike computer cares

On a Garmin Edge, the thing you follow is a course, and with a plain GPX track the device generates turn prompts from the line itself rather than reading them out of your file. Riders on the Garmin Edge 1040 forum put it plainly: a course is a track you navigate along, a route is a path the device calculates itself. An Edge 530 thread adds a detail worth knowing at a trailhead: turn-by-turn has to be set before you start the course, not once you are rolling.

Wahoo puts the same behaviour in writing. Wahoo's support documentation for ELEMNT routes states that ROAM and BOLT v2 units auto-generate turn-by-turn cues for route files that do not contain them, up to 200 km, and that routes imported from Strava contain no cues at all — with the original ELEMNT and BOLT v1 unable to generate them.

So: a downloaded GPX track gives you a line, and any turn instructions are your device's invention. Fine on a forest road at 9 mph, irritating in a town with five-way junctions. Our rundown of GPS navigation devices for bikepacking covers which units guess well.

"

A track is a picture of where somebody went. A route is a set of instructions. Your device treats them differently, and so should you.

Three Ways to Create a Bike Route, and Which One Most People Should Use

Draw it in a planner

A bike GPX route planner puts routable map data under your clicks, snaps the line to real roads and trails, and builds a cue sheet as it goes. That last part is the reason to prefer it: the directions come from map data rather than geometry guessed later.

The tradeoff is that a routing engine believes the map. It does not know a forest road is gated in April, that a "track" is 4 inches of sand, or that a bridge washed out. We compared the planners in the best bikepacking navigation apps.

Record it from a ride

Turn on a computer, ride, export the track. The only method that proves the surface exists, because you were on it. The cost is cleanup: a raw recording is point-dense, includes both wrong turns, and contains the eleven minutes you stood outside a gas station. It carries no directions at all — the purest example of a track.

Download it and adapt it

What most people should do. Route curators have already found the gravel, the water, and the legal camping.

BIKEPACKING.com's guide to using routes explains that you download the GPX from the box below the map, and that the file includes the points of interest shown on the embedded map, saved as waypoints. Those waypoints are the most valuable thing in the download — somebody's field knowledge about water and resupply, which is exactly what our bikepacking resupply guide tells you to plan around. Starting from zero, our list of beginner bikepacking routes in the US will get you a file worth adapting.

How to Split a GPX Route Into Day-Sized Files

The highest-value edit you will make, and the one most riders skip. Four reasons to split a GPX route:

1. Device handling. Long files load slower, redraw slower, and are likelier to hit a limit.
2. Clarity. A screen showing today's 58 miles is legible. A screen showing all 340 is decoration.
3. Battery. A device redrawing a shorter line does less work, and battery is the real constraint on a multi-day trip — see our notes on charging a phone and GPS on the road.
4. Resumability. Bail at lunch and you want to load day 3 tomorrow, not scrub a 340-mile file.

Ride with GPS builds this in. Its help article on splitting, combining and changing routes describes a split tool that breaks a long route into as many smaller routes as you want without altering the original, recommends it specifically for multi-day tours and bikepacking, and notes the new routes carry over points of interest within 3 miles of the track line. Ride with GPS's advanced route planning documentation adds that deleting a section from the middle of a route splits it into two — a legitimate way to cut a segment out. Those advanced planning tools are unlocked with a Premium membership.

Split at a place, not at a mileage

Cut the file where you will actually stop: a campground, a motel, a town with a store. Splitting at "mile 60" ends a file mid-climb and starts tomorrow at a point you must navigate to first. If the overnight is a dispersed site half a mile off the line, split at the junction, not the camp.

How to Merge GPX Segments, and When to Leave Them Split

The same Ride with GPS article covers combining routes alongside splitting them. Merge when the split is an artifact rather than a decision: you planned one day in two halves because the planner struggled with the middle, or you stitched a curated route to a homemade approach from the train station. One riding day, one file. Do not merge across a rest day, a ferry, a shuttle, or a section you plan to skip — those boundaries are information.

The failure mode is the gap. If the last point of segment A is not the same place as the first point of segment B, most tools join them anyway, with a straight line through whatever is in between. Zoom out after every merge — that line is obvious at low zoom and invisible at high zoom, which is exactly the wrong way round.

Reversing a Route Is Not Just Playing the File Backwards

For a bare track with no directions, reversing is trivial: flip the order of the points and ride. For anything with cues attached it is not, for two reasons — turn instructions describe turns in one direction, and one-way segments stay one-way.

Ride with GPS handles this by rebuilding rather than flipping. Its advanced route planning documentation describes a Reverse Route function that rebuilds the route in reverse order using the existing control points while allowing for one-way streets, and warns the result may change slightly where the original uses one-way streets. The cue sheet keeps up: Route Planning 101 notes that when you change a route, the cues update automatically.

That is why we would reverse in a planner, not a file editor: a text-level reverse gives you the correct line and directions for a ride you are not doing. For an out-and-back, export the return leg as its own file and check it on the device first.

How to Edit and Clean Up a GPX File Somebody Else Drew

None of this needs a subscription. The gpx.studio app listing describes a free browser-based editor that adds, moves and deletes track points, reverses traces, merges traces, extracts segments, reduces track point count, and adds elevation data to traces missing it.

Fix, or ignore, the elevation

Elevation is a commonly broken field in a downloaded GPX and, on the road, one of the least important — your legs do not read the file. Some phones and GPS units do not record it accurately, which is why Ride with GPS offers a Replace Elevation Data function that swaps every elevation value in a ride for a worldwide dataset.

Note the caveat cycle.travel raises about modelled elevation: the numbers come from a worldwide grid that is looked up point by point, it "doesn't take any account of tunnels or bridges, where you're not riding at ground level," and in a steep-sided valley the road can appear further up the hill than it actually is. You get a smoother profile, not a truer one.

Thin a point-dense track

GPSBabel's simplify filter exists for this exact job — its documentation describes it as a way to simplify routes and tracks for use with formats that limit the number of points they can contain, and its crosstrack method discards points that sit close enough to the line between their neighbours that the shape barely moves. You cap the output by count — GPSBabel's example count=50 leaves 50 points or fewer — or by a maximum allowable deviation.

Point limits are the highest-risk number here, and device-specific enough that you should look yours up rather than trust a blog. The shape of the problem: a Garmin fēnix forum thread quotes the on-device message "200 course point max. exceeded, final 79 points will not be shown," and an Edge 530 thread asks why the same ceiling covers courses and routes. Course points are a FIT and TCX concept rather than a GPX one, so that is not a track-point limit — but every device has a documented ceiling, and finding it at home is cheaper. Still choosing a unit? Start with the best cycling computers for bikepacking.

Trim the ends and check the waypoints

Recorded tracks often open with a stray point where the device got its first fix in a parking lot three blocks away. Delete it — it is one point, and it is the point your device navigates you to first.

Then check the waypoints. If the download included water, camp and resupply markers, confirm they survived the export and the split — they are the part you would most regret losing.

What to Do Before You Leave

Five minutes at a laptop buys real goodwill on day three.

1. Confirm what the file is. Open it in a text editor and look for trkpt or rtept. That is the whole test.
2. Split it into days, cut where you will actually sleep, named day-1-of-4.gpx through day-4-of-4.gpx.
3. Thin it if it is dense, and check the count against your device's documented limit.
4. Look at it on the device, not the laptop you built it on.
5. Carry a backup — a second device, offline maps, or paper. A file is not a plan.

Loading those files onto a Garmin, Wahoo or Coros is its own small ordeal, and we will cover it separately — along with finding real gravel and mapping water and camp spots.

The file is not sacred. It is text, you can read it, and a stranger's route becomes yours the moment you cut it into your days and put your own overnight points in it. For the rest of the picture — choosing the app, the device, and what to do when the screen goes dark — see our guide to route planning and navigation for bikepacking.