The map you bought,
on the phone in your pocket.
Paid backcountry cartography and free government sheets, loaded onto an iPhone and read where there is no signal. A 1.5 GB map is ready the moment it has finished copying across, because nothing has to be converted first.
iPhone. For portaging, canoe tripping, and walking a long way from a road.
Blaze is being rebuilt around this, and the importers are not finished. There is nothing to install yet — what follows describes the app being built, and Where this is says which parts already run. When there is a version to put on a phone, this page will say so.
Somebody already drew the map you want
The best portage and canoe-route maps are drawn by people who paddle the routes — Maps by Jeff and publishers like them. You buy a file. Governments give away topographic sheets that cover everything else, for nothing, forever. Between those two you can cover almost anywhere you are going.
What is missing is the boring part: getting that file onto a phone and having it open. That is what Blaze is for. It does not draw maps and it does not sell them. It carries the ones you already have.
| Esri tile package | .tpkx |
|---|---|
| Garmin Custom Map, Google Earth | .kmz |
| MBTiles | .mbtiles |
Those three are the first version. GeoTIFF and GeoPDF are planned and are not built — when they work this list will have them on it, and until then it does not.
Nothing is converted, so there is nothing to wait for
A .tpkx arrives already cut into tiles, on the same grid a
web map uses, and stored without compression. Blaze copies the file into
its own storage on import, then reads the tiles straight out of it,
exactly as they came. No import that grinds away for twenty minutes
before you can look at anything, and no unpacked second copy quietly
eating the same gigabytes twice. A KMZ is the one exception: its images
are not on any tile grid, so it is redrawn into tiles once, on import,
and the KMZ itself is then removed.
The wait is the copy across, and that is a wait you already understand: when the file has finished moving, the map is open.
Opened as it came
A map that size, with a tile pulled out of it, measured in milliseconds. Nothing was unpacked to get there.
Formats to start
Tile package, KMZ and MBTiles — the three the maps people actually buy and download come in.
Accounts to make
No sign-in, no registration, nothing about you or where you have been leaves the phone.
Offline is the default, not a mode
Your maps are on the phone. The track you are recording is on the phone. Nothing you need on the water needs a bar of signal, because the app was not built to ask a server for anything once you have what you are carrying.
Underneath your own maps there is a Canada-wide basemap, so there is still ground where a custom map runs out — off the edge of a park sheet, the far side of a lake, the road you take home.
Recording, waypoints, and a GPX at the end
Start a recording and Blaze writes your positions down as they arrive, with the phone in a pocket. Mark a waypoint for a campsite, the top of a portage, or where you left the car.
When you are back, export a GPX. That file is the only thing about your trip that ever leaves the phone, and it leaves because you sent it somewhere.
Free maps, and where the paid ones live
Government topographic sheets are free and public, and finding them is harder than it should be. Blaze keeps a directory of them so the hunt is already done.
| USGS topoView | United States, public domain |
|---|---|
| NRCan CanTopo and GeoGratis | Canada, Open Government Licence |
| OpenTopoMap | Worldwide, contour topography |
Publishers who sell maps appear in the same directory as a link to their shop. Blaze does not host, resell, or repackage anybody's cartography — you buy the map from the person who drew it, and then you carry it.
What it will not do
No reviews, no ratings, no photos, no feed. No badges, no streaks, and no notification asking whether you are still there. There is no account, so there is no profile and nothing to keep warm.
It is a map you carry. The whole job is to be readable when it is getting dark and you would like to know which bay the portage is in.
Where this is
This app used to be about trail conditions — hazard reports matched to stretches of trail, and a server that collected them. That is removed rather than paused. What is left is the part that turned out to matter: carrying a map that works.
| Already running | Track recording with the phone in a pocket, GPX export, the Canada-wide basemap. |
|---|---|
| Measured, not yet in the app | Reading tiles straight out of a 1.54 GB tile package. |
| Being built | The importers for all three formats, waypoints, the directory of free maps. |
| Later | GeoTIFF and GeoPDF. |
Nothing on this page is available to download today. The line above is kept honest for the same reason the app never claimed a trail was clear when nobody had walked it.
A map that will not load?
A format we do not handle, a map that comes in crooked, something in the app that does not work. This is a small project and every report gets read.
Whose data this is
The basemap under your own maps is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence, via Overture Maps and Protomaps.
A map you import stays yours and keeps its own licence — a map you bought is still a map you bought, and Blaze does not send it anywhere. The free ones come from their publishers on the publishers' terms: USGS topoView is public domain, Natural Resources Canada publishes under the Open Government Licence – Canada, and OpenTopoMap renders OpenStreetMap data under CC-BY-SA.