How to import a GPX file into onX Backcountry

The short answer

Open onX Backcountry, use its import option to bring in the .gpx file from Files or iCloud Drive, and the track appears as a line you can overlay on the app's topo, satellite or land ownership layers. Sharing a .gpx file to onX Backcountry from the iOS share sheet — from Files, from an email attachment, or straight from the app that recorded it — lands the track in the same place.

Why onX Backcountry is not really an activity feed

onX Backcountry is built around a different question than Strava or Komoot ask. Instead of a social feed of activities, it layers your position over topo maps, satellite imagery and public/private land boundaries, downloaded ahead of time so they still work with no signal. A GPX track imported into that world is not something to scroll past in a list — it is a line laid over land you are trying to understand, useful for checking where you actually walked against a property line, a management boundary or a route someone else recorded.

Getting the file in

From the iPhone share sheet

A .gpx file sitting in Files, attached to an email, or exported straight out of the app that recorded it can be shared to onX Backcountry through the iOS share sheet, which drops it in as a track without leaving whichever app the file started in.

From inside onX Backcountry

The app also has its own import screen that reads a .gpx file directly out of Files or iCloud Drive. Either route ends the same way — the track sits on the map as something you can view alongside the land layers, and rename or organize from there.

What actually lands, and what does not

A GPX track — the ordered, timestamped points a GPS recorder wrote down — comes in as a continuous line, with elevation carried along for each point if the original file has it. Waypoints, where the file has any, come in as separate markers rather than part of the line. What stays behind is anything the format was never built to hold: photos, video clips and voice notes captured along the walk are separate files, with no field in GPX to carry them, so the import brings across the shape of the route and not what you noticed on it.

Things that trip people up

• The track imported but nothing shows on the map — the layer's visibility may be off, or the map is centered somewhere else entirely; onX drops the track at its real coordinates regardless of what the map happens to be showing.
• Only markers show up, no line — the file held waypoints rather than a recorded track, which happens with files exported from tools built around marking spots rather than continuously logging a route.
• The file will not open on the phone — check the extension is still .gpx; some email clients and messaging apps rewrite attachments and lose the extension along the way.
• The elevation profile looks flat or missing — this reflects what the original GPX file carried, not something onX changes on import; a file recorded without elevation per point has nothing to show.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records a route with GPS on an iPhone and exports it as GPX 1.1 or CSV, for a single walk or the whole history at once — the same format onX Backcountry, along with Strava, Garmin Connect and Komoot, reads directly. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.