Who We Are

Where the pavement ends

Gravelmap started the way a lot of good rides do: staring down a promising dirt road and wondering where it went. In the spring of 2014, a web developer and lifelong cyclist in southern Oregon kept hearing the same question from other riders — “does anyone know where the gravel is?” Road maps didn't say. So he built the answer: a map you could draw on. Click, drag, and drop points to trace a route, check its elevation, export a GPX file, and share it with anyone.

The site went live on April 1, 2014. It launched nearly empty — a map of everywhere, showing almost nothing — and that was the point: every route on Gravelmap comes from a rider who was actually there. By the end of that first year the community had drawn nearly a thousand routes. They never slowed down.

Part of the Whitewater family

In 2024, Gravelmap joined Whitewater — the U.S. National Whitewater Center, a North Carolina 501(c)(3) nonprofit built around a simple belief: people are made to play outside. Whitewater's mission is to facilitate access to the active, outdoor lifestyle, and Gravelmap fits it naturally — a tool that gets more people onto more unpaved roads.

Since then the site has been rebuilt piece by piece: smarter filters, surface-type detection, a faster map, and a cleaner design. What hasn't changed is the deal Gravelmap has offered since day one — it's free, it's community-built, and it's about the ride.

Built by riders

Gravelmap works because riders add what they know. Every route here started as someone's local knowledge — the climb worth doing, the creek crossing worth knowing about, the road that looks paved on every other map and isn't. Found a road worth riding? Put it on the map.