Hiking times that actually add up

A two-kilometer walk through a park and a two-kilometer climb up a mountain should not share the same clock. Until now, most routing engines gave them one anyway — and the result was always the same: the map says twenty minutes, the trail takes an hour.

Guru Maps now does better. Pedestrian directions account for the shape of the ground under your feet, so the estimated time reflects the climb ahead instead of an optimistic flat-walking pace. It's a big win for hiking, where the gap was largest — and every walking route benefits, right down to a hilly street across town.

Why flat speed never worked for trails

Distance explains most of the time on a paved path. The moment a route starts climbing, it stops being a good predictor. Seven hundred meters of ascent is not a normal walk, and a steep alpine descent isn't "faster because it's downhill" — it's slow and careful.

The old behavior was always too optimistic. A short-looking line on the map became a short-looking ETA, even when the trail itself told a more honest story.

What changed

Walking routes now use a slope-aware model. In plain terms:

• Mild downhill is fastest — the easy, gentle descents where you make good time.
• Climbing slows you down as the grade steepens.
• Steep descents slow you down too, the way real trails do.

The result is an ETA that lines up much better with the posted times you see on trail signs — and it's the same model everywhere, whether you're hiking in the Alps, the Tatras, or just walking up a steep part of town. As always, it works fully offline, so you get honest times with no signal at all.

This builds on the same routing engine behind Guru Maps. If you're curious how it actually works — the data we used, the formulas we rejected, and why we kept a deliberately simple slope curve — our team wrote up the full engineering story: Teaching Valhalla That Hiking Is Not Flat.

How to get it

The app support arrived in Guru Maps 6.2.1. The realistic times are baked into the maps themselves, so you'll feel the full effect once you grab the July map update for the regions you explore — head to your downloaded maps and refresh them.

Then pick a route, choose the Pedestrian mode, and trust the clock a little more. Enjoy the trail! 🥾