A statewide map of California National Forest Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) routes — every Forest Service road and trail designated for motor vehicle use — filterable by vehicle type and date, with live fire, smoke, air-quality, and snow overlays so you can judge what's open and reachable right now.
It turns the Forest Service's static, forest-by-forest MVUM PDFs into one live, filterable map across all 17 California national forests.
⚠️ Verify before you go. MVUM shows legal designation, not temporary Forest closure orders. The fire/smoke/AQI/snow layers are situational awareness, not official closures. Always confirm current conditions with the managing forest.
- All 17 CA forests, one map — baked into a single vector-tile file, no tile server.
- Street-legal vs. OHV vehicle profiles — the question in California isn't "what vehicle" but "how it's registered." A plated dual-sport may use any highway-legal road plus its OHV routes; a green/red-sticker machine may use only OHV-designated routes. Each profile maps to the underlying MVUM class tokens accordingly.
- Season-aware — routes open/close by the MVUM
datesopenwindow for the date you pick. - Roads vs. trails — graded roads draw as bold solid lines; trails as a finer dashed line.
- Find a place — geocoded place search (CA-biased) plus a 17-forest quick-jump.
- Live conditions — fire perimeters (with the count of your routes inside one), smoke aloft, ground-level air quality, and snow depth.
- Export what you see — download the currently-visible open routes as a GPX or KML file to load into Gaia, onX, or a Garmin before you lose signal.
- Tap for weather — tap anywhere off a route for the NWS point forecast plus on-device sunrise/sunset and daylight-remaining (computed locally, no key).
- Straight to the source — every route popup links to its forest's official Forest Service MVUM.
Two halves:
- Python build pipeline (
pipeline/) pulls MVUM roads + trails from the USFS EDW ArcGIS service, normalizes the vehicle-class/season fields into a compact schema, clips to California, and bakes everything into a single PMTiles vector-tile file. - Static web app (
web/) — a MapLibre GL single-page app that serves those tiles and fetches the live overlays client-side. No server runtime: the app deploys as static files anywhere, with the route tiles served from object storage (R2) that supports HTTP range requests. See Deploy.
| Layer | Source | Freshness |
|---|---|---|
| Routes + legal access | USFS MVUM (EDW MapServer) | baked at build time |
| Wildfire perimeters | NIFC / WFIGS current interagency perimeters | live, per visit |
| Smoke aloft | NOAA HMS satellite smoke detection | live, per visit |
| Air quality (ground) | EPA AirNow combined-AQI contours | live, per visit |
| Snow depth | NOAA NOHRSC (SNODAS) snow analysis WMS | live, per visit |
| Weather forecast | NWS (api.weather.gov) point forecast | live, per tap |
| Basemap | USGS Topo (desaturated) | tiles |
Smoke vs. air quality are intentionally separate: HMS smoke is a plume traced from satellite (smoke overhead); AirNow AQI is the interpolated surface of ground monitors (what you actually breathe).
Light-only "classic cartographic" theme: the USGS topo basemap is desaturated to
a gray pencil sheet so its own green forest boundaries and blue water recede,
leaving a purple route overprint (a nod to the historical USGS photorevision
overprint) as the only saturated thing on the map. Route status is encoded by
color and line pattern and width, so it survives color-blindness and sun
glare. See PRODUCT.md / DESIGN.md.
Requires uv and
tippecanoe (brew install tippecanoe).
make fetch # MVUM roads+trails for all 17 CA forests -> data/*.geojson
make normalize # compact schema + CA clip -> data/ca-normalized.geojson
make tiles # tippecanoe -> web/public/tiles/routes.pmtiles
# or all three:
make dataThe fetch is polite (paginated, retried) and takes a few minutes. Re-run it to
refresh against the latest MVUM, and bump DATA_VINTAGE in web/src/config.ts.
make web-install # cd web && npm install
make dev # vite dev server
make build # static build -> web/distThe app reads web/public/tiles/routes.pmtiles (committed), so it runs without
rebuilding the data.
Live at https://ca-mvum.typearson.dev, hosted on Cloudflare Pages.
It's a pure static build, so any static host works. The repo is wired for
Cloudflare Pages Git auto-deploy — every push to main builds and ships:
| Pages build setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Root directory | web |
| Build command | npm run build |
| Build output directory | dist |
Manual deploy (bypassing Git), from web/:
npm run build
npx wrangler pages deploy dist --project-name ca-mvum --branch mainThe app (HTML/CSS/JS) ships via Pages, but the route tiles live in a Cloudflare
R2 bucket (ca-mvum-tiles) served at https://tiles.ca-mvum.typearson.dev.
PMTiles reads them with HTTP range requests — only the bytes for the tiles in
view are fetched, so the map paints fast and a visitor who never leaves one area
never downloads the whole ~16 MB archive. R2 is the right host for this because it
serves real 206 range responses and CORS (Cloudflare Pages does not — it returns
the whole file with a 200, which the PMTiles client rejects).
web/src/config.ts points production at R2 when import.meta.env.PROD is set (a
plain vite build), and falls back to the local committed file in dev. The tile
upload is automated separately from the app deploy:
| What | How | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| App (HTML/JS/tiles fallback) | Cloudflare Pages Git build | every push to main |
| Route tiles → R2 | .github/workflows/deploy-tiles.yml (wrangler r2 object put) |
push to main that changes web/public/tiles/routes.pmtiles |
The tile workflow needs two repo secrets: CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN (scoped to
Workers R2 Storage: Edit) and CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID. Manual upload, from web/:
npx wrangler r2 object put ca-mvum-tiles/routes.pmtiles \
--file public/tiles/routes.pmtiles --content-type application/octet-stream --remoteThe R2 setup (bucket, custom domain, CORS) and the rationale/rollback are in
docs/r2-range-requests-plan.md.
web/wrangler.toml and web/public/_headers hold the Pages config.
pipeline/
forests.py # the 17 CA forests
fetch_mvum.py # paginated ArcGIS REST pull (roads + trails)
normalize.py # compact schema, datesopen parsing, CA clip
build_tiles.py # tippecanoe -> routes.pmtiles
web/
src/config.ts # vehicle profiles + live data endpoints + data vintage
src/legal.ts # vehicle/date -> open/closed expressions
src/style.ts # route layers (road/trail), status colors, filters
src/fire.ts # perimeters + route intersection
src/smoke.ts # HMS smoke-aloft polygons
src/aqi.ts # AirNow ground-level AQI contours
src/snow.ts # NOHRSC snow-depth WMS raster
src/search.ts # place geocoder + forest quick-jump
src/export.ts # GPX/KML export of the visible open routes
src/weather.ts # tap-for-weather (NWS) + on-device sun times
src/main.ts # map, controls, popups
PRODUCT.md / DESIGN.md # impeccable design context
MVUM, NOHRSC, and NWS data are U.S. government works. Fire data © NIFC/WFIGS; smoke © NOAA HMS; air quality © EPA AirNow; place search © OpenStreetMap/Nominatim contributors. Basemap © USGS The National Map. This is a planning aid, not a legal authority.
Source code under the MIT License. Third-party data is subject to its providers' own terms (see above).
A personal project, shared as-is — built for my own use, with no warranty or support.