Every card checked against the app

Everything Dustlark does.

Dustlark is an offline offroad and overlanding map for iPhone, in beta on TestFlight across 11 western states, plus a free route planner at app.dustlark.app that needs no account and no install. This page lists what the app actually ships today — every card below is true of the current build, and where something is still rolling out state by state, gated behind a toggle, or otherwise partial, it says so in the same sentence. What's not here yet gets its own honest section near the bottom.

11states live

124features listed

67manual answers

0accounts needed

The offline map

The base layer for everything else: download it once, and it works with zero bars, forever.

Paint an area, download it

Frame where you're going at Tight, Medium, or Wide, choose your layers, and each one shows its exact size before you download — not an estimate.

Layers on by default, and off

Base map, MVUM roads and trails, and elevation come with every download. Aerial imagery and full-resolution topo scans are large, so they wait for you to ask.

Nothing re-downloads once it's saved

Everything you pull lands on this device for good. Off the grid, out of signal, next month — it's already there.

Crosses a state line? It says so

A download box that straddles two states tells you plainly that the map may thin out past the border, so you know to frame a second box.

Search with zero bars

Place names, trail names, and Wikipedia titles, matched entirely offline over whatever you've downloaded — no signal required.

Paste a coordinate, land there

Decimal, DMS, or UTM — paste any of the three and the map jumps straight to it instead of searching by name.

Long-press to see what's here

Coordinates, elevation, who manages the land, and the private owner if you've downloaded parcel data — one gesture, no menu to hunt through.

A stuck download resumes, not restarts

Close the sheet, background the app, lose signal — a corridor download picks back up from exactly where it stopped. Nothing already saved downloads twice.

Not enough space? It checks first

Before a big download starts, Dustlark checks your device's actual free space and says so plainly instead of failing silently partway through.

A field manual, built in

60 questions and answers about how Dustlark actually works, searchable with zero signal, written from the app's own verified behavior — not marketing copy.

Map layers

Six looks and a growing stack of data layers, each one honest about how far it's rolled out.

Six looks, one tap to cycle

Outdoors for every day, Dustlark Topo, current US Topo quads, Hillshade for reading terrain fast, scanned Historic topo, and real aerial Satellite imagery. The route line itself gets six bright colors and four weights in Settings → Appearance, so it never fades into a busy one — and Map markings, one row up, turns the map's own names and roads up to Bold or High contrast for a phone on a mount.

A look you haven't downloaded gets skipped

Satellite needs Imagery, US Topo needs its own layer. The style button skips looks you don't have instead of ever landing you on a blank map.

US Topo, rebaked clean

Current USGS 7.5-minute quads rebaked so frames abut exactly, with no collar and no gap, byte-verified across every live state.

Statewide satellite, offline

A full-state aerial imagery base under crisp trail-corridor detail, downloaded and yours. Live in Utah; more states rolling out.

1-meter lidar hillshade & road geometry

Switchback-level terrain relief, plus computed road width and drop-off exposure checked against your rig. Live in Utah today, a curated layer that grows by area.

Legal trail network

Official Forest Service Motor Vehicle Use Maps plus BLM public-motorized routes, each carrying its class and season, live across all 11 states.

Land ownership, agency by agency

Public-land boundaries — Forest Service, BLM, state, park — shown as a checkerboard fill telling you who manages the ground, live everywhere Dustlark covers.

Private parcels with owner names

Tap a lot for owner, acreage, and legal description where county data allows. Live in Utah and Colorado, expanding state by state.

Bedrock geology, tap to identify

USGS rock-type mapping at 1:500,000, colored and tappable, live in every state Dustlark covers.

Mud risk from real soil data

USDA soil surveys flag clay-heavy ground that turns to grease when wet. Rolling out state by state — Utah, California, and Colorado today.

Offline Wikipedia

Articles for peaks, rivers, and landmarks, downloaded with your area. Rolling out state by state — Utah and Colorado today.

Campgrounds, trailheads & named places

Recreation.gov points of interest and labeled places, part of the base download everywhere Dustlark covers.

Planning

Snap-to-trail routing, real dates, and real fuel math — plan the trip on your phone.

Snap-to-trail as you draw

Tap the map and your route snaps to the legal network, live on the phone across all 11 states.

Multi-day trips: camps and mornings

Drop a day break and the route becomes a multi-day trip automatically. Set a departure time once; every later morning defaults to an 8 AM roll-out, yours to change.

Suggest camps

One tap splits a long route into driving days and places each night, preferring known campgrounds and public land. Set a make-camp-by time, a driving-hours cap, and a pace, and each day ends at whichever limit comes first. Pin the camps you like; only the rest get moved.

Layover nights

Any camp can hold you for more than one night, and the whole schedule — daylight, weather, closures — shifts to match.

Edit any trip in Plan

Every trip's menu has Edit in Plan: reopen it in the draft editor with its day breaks, waypoints, and schedule intact, and drag it into shape — including a GPX track that arrived as a fixed line.

An itinerary you can print

One day-by-day view for the whole trip — dates, camps, miles, arrival time, that night's forecast, and a notes field per day — plus an Itinerary (PDF) built for the glovebox.

Departure brief

Before you leave: whether your maps are actually downloaded, what the route demands, and what to check. The last screen worth reading at the trailhead.

Weather at each camp

Every camp on a multi-day route gets its own forecast for its own coordinate and date. Past a few days out, Dustlark says plainly it's too far to forecast.

Will a gate be closed?

Route assessment checks every seasonal gate you cross against your trip's real scheduled dates, and comes back clean or names exactly what's shut and when it reopens.

Is it legal, and do you have the fuel

Off-network legs get flagged rather than hidden; the fuel plan checks every leg against your rig's real range and shows where a 20% reserve would break.

Drag to reroute

Grab the line and pull it onto the road you meant. Only that leg recalculates — the rest of your route stays exactly where it was.

Download maps for just this trip

A corridor download buffers 5 miles either side of your route and queues it through the normal pipeline, running in the background even if you close the sheet.

Scan a trip onto your phone

The scanner reads a route QR from the web planner, another driver's phone, or a printed packet, and opens one review sheet — route, offline corridor, and a convoy invite if the code carries one. Nothing imports until you confirm.

Bring in a route from elsewhere

Standard GPX in, any size. A file with real timestamps imports as a recording; one without imports as a fully editable planned trip.

Share a trip, one QR

One code carries the route and, if you turn it on, your convoy invite too, so a new buddy gets both in one scan.

The web planner

The same planning engine, free in any browser, no account, no install.

Plan free, in any browser

app.dustlark.app is a full route planner with no account, no install, and no interstitial between you and a drawn route.

Snap-to-trail runs in the browser

The same legal-network routing as the phone, live across all 11 states, solved client-side against the real routing graph.

Legality is the rendering

Solid line means on the legal network; dashed means honestly not. No confident wrong snaps dressed up as real routes.

Closures checked as you draw

Seasonal gates on your route surface while you're planning, with their real open windows — not after you're standing at a locked gate.

Grade-colored line, live elevation

Every leg colored by steepness as you draw, with a live elevation chart underneath and hover-scrub to read any point on it.

Multi-day plans, fuel gaps included

Day breaks, auto-named legs from the road network, and fuel range checked the same way the phone does.

GPX import becomes a real plan

Drop in an outside track and it opens as a fully editable route, not a dead line, with snap-to-trail off by default so a long track doesn't stall the solver.

Reverse and out-and-back

Mirror a route or run it there-and-back with a turnaround waypoint at the apex, the same semantics as the phone.

One QR, either direction

Draw it on a real keyboard, scan it onto your phone — or scan a phone-drawn route back into the browser, fully editable on arrival either way.

Driving & navigation

Turn-by-turn, voice, and one composed instrument that behaves like a car dash.

Guide any planned trip

Percent complete, miles remaining, and an ETA that accounts for grade, not just distance.

Real turn-by-turn where roads are downloaded

The next maneuver, its distance, and a preview of the one after it. Without a road network, guiding still works — you just lose turn-by-turn, the same honest degrade as everywhere else.

One instrument, not five pills

The driving panel stacks guide name, current maneuver, and progress into a single fixed-size readout that doesn't resize at larger text, deliberately, like a speedometer.

Voice, said twice, easy to mute

Upcoming turns are called out once with lead distance and again right at the maneuver, plus off-route, gate warnings, and rejoin turns. All speech runs on-device.

Off route? It solves a rejoin

Wander 50 meters off the line for 5 seconds and Dustlark starts solving a path back to a point ahead on your route, turning a bare warning into a real turn.

Seasonal gates while you drive

A quiet heads-up at 2 miles out; if the gate is actually closed, the strip turns full ember and Dustlark says so at both range and close approach.

Recording rides along, one strip

Guide and record at the same time and your live distance folds into the driving panel's own progress row instead of a second competing readout.

A camera that doesn't fight your driving

The follow camera glides continuously with your position instead of catching up in lurches, holding its ease through rough, bouncy sections.

Ending a guide leaves recording alone

Two different buttons on purpose: stopping navigation and stopping a recording are separate decisions.

Recording your drives

Every drive becomes a track, a set of waypoints, and a felt difficulty rating, captured as you go.

Start, pause, resume, stop

REC runs independent of whatever else the map is doing. Pause cuts GPS and motion sensing for battery, without ending the trip.

Survives a dead battery or a crash

Every recording is journaled to disk as you go; a paused recording restores across a relaunch exactly as you left it.

The privacy prompt at your driveway

The first time you tap REC, Dustlark offers to trim your driveway from every future track's start and end, before those points are ever written anywhere.

Drop waypoints with photos

Flag your exact position, pick a kind — Gate, Water crossing, Obstacle, Campsite, Photo spot, Turnoff — and land straight on that waypoint's card to add photos.

Auto-marked stops

Stay in a small radius long enough — 5 minutes and 200 feet by default — and Dustlark drops a waypoint on its own, named for the time you stopped.

TerrainSense: your phone feels the trail

Motion sensors classify washboard, rock gardens, crawl sections, off-camber lean, and steep pitches live, as a dial, from any mount position.

Multi-day: marking a camp

Pause and tap END DAY to split a trip's stats and story by day, or let a pause across midnight (or 6+ hours) mark the same boundary automatically.

The 30-second debrief

Three quick questions after a real drive — scraped, needed a spotter, how many gates — plus a 1-to-5 feel rating. Your own difficulty read, not someone else's star rating.

GPS accuracy, told straight

Any fix worse than 50 meters gets thrown out rather than plotted, so a bad reading means a gap in your track, never a wild jump.

After the drive

What a recorded trip becomes: a STORY, a keepsake PDF, a card to text, and exports that always work.

Your trip's STORY

A cover with the whole route and headline stats, then a chapter per day: the day's line, elevation profile, waypoints in order with photos, and terrain worth mentioning.

Only what stood out

Terrain beats are clustered and thresholded to the notable stretches — a sustained washboard mile, a slow crawl section — never a log of every bump.

Planned vs. actual

When a recording ran under a guide, its STORY shows exactly where you departed from the plan, and by how much.

Superlatives, measured not invented

Highest point, roughest mile, longest crawl — every number in your STORY is measured from the recording. No generated narration, ever.

The keepsake PDF

Your STORY as a monochrome-printer-honest document: cover, per-day pages with a route crop and photo plates, and an epilogue with your debrief.

Shareable story cards

A one-image summary of a trip — route, stats, a superlative or two, one photo if you pick one — sized for dropping straight into a group text.

Clean up GPS glitches

A recording with a physically impossible jump shows a CLEAN TRACK prompt with the point count found. You review and confirm — nothing is ever removed automatically.

The trip packet PDF

Masthead and stats, a scannable QR, the route line, elevation profile, a per-day table with camp coordinates, seasonal closures, and a waypoints table — paginated for the glovebox.

The one-page paper backup

A simpler, monochrome-safe SAR handoff card: your route's shape, day-by-day camp coordinates, your rig's description, and a QR that scans straight back into Dustlark.

GPX out to any other app

Every recorded trip exports as standard GPX, offline, no account or connection required.

Export always works

Every file is generated on your phone from data already on your phone. If Dustlark disappeared tomorrow, everything you've recorded would still open, print, and export exactly as it does today.

Convoy & radio

A Meshtastic®-compatible radio puts your whole group on one map with zero cell service.

What a trail radio actually does

A small Meshtastic-compatible device, paired over Bluetooth, puts your truck on your convoy's maps and carries texts between you with zero cell bars.

You never make a radio decision

The moment it connects, Dustlark reads your radio's settings and fixes whatever would make it fail silently — an unset region, a mismatched mode, a factory name, a clock stuck at 1970 — then proves every fix by reading it back.

The pairing code, explained first

Dustlark tells you which 6-digit code your phone's Bluetooth prompt will ask for before that system dialog ever appears. On a fleet radio it's the group's code, shown on that same step.

Starting vs. joining a convoy

Start names a private group and shows an invite QR; Join opens the camera to scan someone else's. Every group gets a fresh random encryption key. A fleet radio already carries the group — connect it and you're in, no invite to scan.

Seeing your convoy on the map

Share your position at an interval you pick — 5, 15, or 60 seconds — relayed rig to rig across the mesh, never through any server.

Where everyone has been

Turn on Show trails in Trip Group and the map draws each rig's recent path, ending in a marker where and when it was last heard — so when someone goes quiet you drive back to their last fix instead of guessing.

Texting your convoy

A plain text channel to your whole group, with canned quick-sends for one-handed use, no cell service needed.

SOS: one tap, every radio for miles

Mechanical, Stuck, or Medical repeats over the radio every minute until you stand down. Responders tap On my way; you see exactly how many rigs are answering.

Scout markers

A quick trail-condition report — gate, washout, hazard, camp — relays rig to rig and shows up as a pin and a banner on everyone's map.

Is your radio actually working?

The radio card always shows battery, firmware, link mode, region, and channel utilization, plus a mesh-health label if the group's getting saturated. Trip Group lists every rig's battery and voltage as its radio last reported them, and when it was last heard.

More than one radio

Every radio you've set up sits in a short list with one current, and you switch between them without forgetting any — each keeps its own settings on the radio. Your trip group follows you to whichever radio is current; power the other one off, or it stays in the convoy as a second copy of you.

Fleet radios, one code

A trip leader sets up the group's radios from Dustlark — name, reporting interval, the trip group, one six-digit pairing code shared by every fleet radio, and the leader's radio key — then hands them out. Each radio keeps its settings and is never locked; a friend who connects one picks up the trip group from the radio itself.

Restart or reset from the app

Restart reboots the radio and has it back in about 10 seconds; Factory reset erases the radio's own settings, keeps its Bluetooth pairing, and lets Dustlark tune it again — behind a confirmation, and never while an SOS is armed. The full wipe that also drops pairings stays in the Meshtastic app.

Airtime that manages itself

Parked rigs stretch their update interval out on their own and snap back the moment they're moving again, so a still convoy doesn't waste airtime it doesn't need.

The convoy black box

A crash-safe log of every mesh event this phone has seen — positions, texts, markers, SOS, acks — exportable from Diagnostics for reconstructing what happened on the trail.

Works with Meshtastic radios, honestly

On a radio you set up yourself, Dustlark never touches the pairing mode or encryption keys. A fleet radio — one a trip leader sets up for the group — gets the group's pairing code and the leader's radio key, and Dustlark says so before it does; it never locks the radio. If you already know Meshtastic, its own official app still works right alongside Dustlark.

Safety & getting home

Built for the day something goes wrong, not just the postcard.

Get Me Out

Your position in three formats — decimal, DMS, and UTM, the one SAR teams ask for — tap to copy, plus nearest named places with distance and bearing, and daylight left before sunset.

Follow your own breadcrumbs back

Reverses whatever you've recorded this trip into a guide: the one route you know is passable today, because you just drove it.

Check-in reminders, with a prepared text

Set a check-in interval on your trip and an emergency contact once in Settings. Miss two check-ins and Dustlark prepares a text with your last known location for you to review and send yourself — it never sends anything on its own.

The convoy watchdog

While your convoy's moving, Dustlark watches for a rig more than 2 miles back and not closing, or one unheard from for 10 minutes, and banners it by name.

No GPS signal in a canyon

Any fix worse than 50 meters gets thrown out. A gap in your track means the signal was bad, not a bug — recording resumes cleanly once a good fix returns.

Radio won't connect

Restart the radio first — from the app while it's connected, by hand when it isn't. Dustlark then names what it sees: a radio it can see but can't reach, a link that keeps dropping right after connecting, or a pairing the radio no longer accepts — each with its next step, and Forget This Device only once a restart didn't take.

A real emergency

911 reaches any carrier's bars, and recent iPhones reach emergency services by satellite with none at all. Convoy's SOS reaches your own group, not a dispatcher — it's not a substitute for calling when help can actually be reached.

Every failure names its cause

A download that fails says why and offers Retry; a route with no downloaded road network says so and links straight to the fix. Nothing here fails silently.

Land, legality & data provenance

What's legal, whose land it is, and where every number on the map actually comes from.

Legal trails, not guesses

Official Forest Service Motor Vehicle Use Maps plus BLM public-motorized routes, each carrying its class and season, is what "on the network" means everywhere in Dustlark.

Two lookalikes, opposite meanings

An MVUM road (solid ember) is legal to drive; an MVUM trail (dashed gold) is OHV-only. Public land ownership (green checkerboard) is a different thing entirely from private parcel lines (tan) — read them carefully.

Off-network legs are flagged, not hidden

A straight line between two dropped points shows up plainly as unverified rather than dressed up as a real route. Verify access and ownership yourself for those stretches.

Closures checked against real dates

A gate open today can be closed by the time you actually leave. Dustlark only knows the difference if you tell it your real departure date.

Where the map data comes from

Base map: OpenStreetMap. Trails: USFS MVUM. Routes: BLM. Ownership: USGS PAD-US. Elevation: USGS 3DEP. Imagery: NAIP. Parcels: county recorder offices. Articles: Wikipedia. Every layer traces to a named public source.

Every card cites its source and date

A downloaded region is only as current as the day you downloaded it. Regions → Check for updates compares it against the live catalog and refreshes only what's stale.

Township, range & UTM grids

A UTM grid draws live for wherever you're looking, no download needed. PLSS township-and-range section lines (T7S-R2E, SEC-17 style) are baked data queued to publish, Utah first.

A statewide file where one exists

Colorado's parcels come from one public statewide composite covering all 64 counties — owner, acreage, zoning, assessed value — rather than a patchwork. Cards show whatever a county actually publishes.

Privacy & your data

What's on your phone, what leaves it, and the settings that close the real gaps.

What's on your phone, what's not

Trips, photos, and your garage live on this device, encrypted while it's locked. Downloaded maps aren't backed up — they just re-download free if you lose them.

The privacy zone

A radius around home where recorded tracks are never allowed to start or end. Points inside are cut before they're ever saved anywhere, including the crash-recovery journal.

iCloud backup: what it protects

Your recorded trips, garage, and debriefs copy to your private iCloud — the things that are truly irreplaceable. Downloaded maps are deliberately left out; they're free to re-fetch.

The setting that closes Apple's gap

Advanced Data Protection makes your iCloud backups, Dustlark's included, readable only by your own devices, not Apple.

If your phone is stolen

Stolen Device Protection requires Face ID with no passcode fallback for the dangerous account changes, closing the realistic attack: someone who watched you type your passcode.

Streaming: what the relay sees

Optional online browsing runs through a no-log relay — nobody, not even Dustlark, sees what you looked at. Your downloads and recordings never touch it.

What Convoy sends, and doesn't

Positions, texts, SOS, and scout markers travel radio to radio across your own mesh. None of it, ever, touches a server, a cell network, or the internet.

No account required, ever

Every trip is yours to take out, forever, with zero connection required — GPX, PDF, or a share link. Nothing depends on a Dustlark server being up.

Sharing diagnostics without oversharing

A plain-text report of app version, battery, storage, and recent activity you can share when something's wrong. It deliberately carries no location and no personal data.

Platform & accessibility

How the app itself is built: accessibility, appearance, and the on-device promise.

Built for VoiceOver

Real labels throughout, decorative icons hidden from the reading order, and related pieces of a card combined into one stop instead of a dozen fragments.

Text scales with you, mostly

Content screens — trip lists, Settings, your STORY — grow with your Dynamic Type setting. The driving instrument and map-overlaid chrome stay fixed size on purpose, like a speedometer, but still shrink gracefully rather than overflow.

Contrast that actually reads

Status text worth reading is held to a real contrast floor, checked and fixed where it fell short.

Night Stage

A true dark skin that flips the whole app, map included — automatically with your device, or set it yourself in Settings.

Hillshade that follows the real sun

Turn it on and the Outdoors map's terrain shading tracks where the sun actually is right now, instead of one fixed light from one fixed direction.

On-device, start to finish

Voice callouts, TerrainSense, your STORY — generated on your phone, from your phone's own data. Nothing about your route or position leaves the device to produce any of it.

No tracking, no ads

Dustlark doesn't sell location history and doesn't run ads.

Your rig, everywhere in the app

Set clearance, tank size, tires, and lockers once in the Garage, and trail cards, fuel range, and warnings on tight sections personalize to it everywhere.

Honest by design

What's not here yet

Dustlark doesn't ship a roadmap item as if it were a feature. Five things worth naming plainly.

CarPlay

Dustlark doesn't run on your truck's screen yet. The entitlement request is filed with Apple and still pending.

Accounts, sync & subscriptions

There's no sign-in today and nothing paywalled — everything on this page runs on-device, free, during the beta. A subscription with encrypted multi-device sync is planned; there's no ship date yet.

Full 50-state coverage

11 western states carry the core map. Several deeper layers — statewide satellite, 1-meter lidar, parcel owner names, mud risk, offline Wikipedia — are live in Utah, or Utah and Colorado, and roll out state by state from there. PLSS survey sections are built but not published in any state yet; Utah goes first.

A real iPad experience

Dustlark installs and runs on iPad, but it's a stretched iPhone layout today with no tablet-specific design. That work hasn't started.

A Dustlark-branded radio

Convoy works now with off-the-shelf Meshtastic-compatible hardware you already own. A purpose-built Dustlark radio is a future idea, not a shipping product.