OnX’s New Fire and Smoke Layers Add Value to Popular Outdoor App

While testing a new Toyota Tacoma in late August, the OnX Offroad app popped up with a new feature. Hoping to escape the Southern California summer heat, I downloaded OnX ​​as a guide to Monache Meadows, deep in the Inyo National Forest. The end of summer usually means wildfire season in California, and the OnX app surprised me with a new overlay that showed recent fire activity and smoke density on a more familiar topographic map I use to plan and track off-road routes.

To learn more about the new information available, I reached out to Tony Cannistra, senior software engineer at OnX.

“Fires are now part of our landscape, every summer,” Cannistra told me. “While we’ve had these layers in the past, we’ve updated the data to be newer and more detailed for this season. Some are updated hourly, and we’re also providing more detail.”

OnX pulls data from a combination of sources. The National Interagency Fire Center provides a perimeter for each reported fire, while new hot spots detected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) satellite sensors are courtesy of NASA. A rapidly refreshing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration model tracks the location and density of smoke, which OnX then overlays on the app’s three different map options: satellite, hybrid, or topographic.

“These satellite-detected heat spots are updated hourly,” Cannistra explained. “When overlaid on OnX maps, they can help our users visualize conditions in near real time, seeing a fire on the map represented by a glowing yellow dot long before its perimeter is reported.”

Hot spots are a good way to show where exactly within the orange boundaries of a reported wildfire there may still be active flares. Varying layers of color, from a dark red block to a faint yellow haze, indicate where the smoke has dispersed or consolidated due to wind and terrain conditions. During my trip to Monache Meadows, the wildfire overlay appeared automatically in my OnX Offroad app, but I had to click the Activity tab and toggle “Forest Fire Smoke” to the on setting to activate the overlay.

Layers work well in both 3D and 2D map modes, and when combined with OnX’s weather forecasting feature, they can provide a sense of confidence when exploring the great outdoors. For example, while driving to Monache Meadows, National Park signs announced that the area was closed due to a fire as I turned off U.S. Route 395 north of Pearsonville, California.

But I checked OnX ​​and saw that many users had reported that Monache Meadows had been open for the previous two weeks, and the app streaming over wireless Apple CarPlay showed where fire activity had been reduced—a good distance to the southwest. Given the map and user reports, I decided to head for the mountains with confidence.

“Unfortunately, outdoor enthusiasts in the West are no strangers to the dangers of wildfire country,” Cannistra said. “Our Active Wildfire layer can help our users make an informed plan for the landscapes they plan to visit.”

OnX includes a full set of fire and smoke layers in the Basic and Elite membership levels of the app for Offroad, Backcountry, and Hunt subscribers. But in addition to providing information that campers, hikers, off-road enthusiasts, mountain bikers, or hunters can use to plan trips, I recently discovered that OnX fire and smoke maps also help in more serious situations, as the recent Bridge Fire—then the largest in California—spread into Angeles Forest and began to threaten my family’s home.

In helping prepare for evacuation, we all checked websites run by Cal Fire, InciWeb, and the Windy app countless times a day. But Cal Fire and InciWeb only update once or twice a day, so I began using OnX almost exclusively as the most up-to-date source of fire, smoke, and weather data in one place. The wind and hot spot information, in particular, provided at least a semblance of predictive behavior amid the stress of the approaching fire.

I still prefer to explore off-road and hiking trails with a paper map. But for anyone living in fire-prone regions, not just those who enjoy outdoor recreation regularly or occasionally, this new feature makes the OnX more than just a useful tool, one that translates directly to safety. At $34.99 per year for the Premium version and $99.99 per year for the Elite version, the investment seems worth it for the extra peace of mind. And hopefully, this additional information will help raise awareness about safer practices in regions prone to annual wildfires.