Best River Maps, Guidebooks, and Apps for Rafters and Paddlers

Michele Crockett

Updated on:

Gear
Collage of river guides and river guide digital app on iPhone

As any grade schooler can tell you, nearly any decently detailed map will show you the rivers—skinny blue threads for the little creeks, big snaking tubes for the Mississippi down around Louisiana. But for river runners, the essential river map information includes—at minimum—the location of access points, rapids, and campsites, with bonus points for popular hikes, petroglyphs, hot springs, ruins, abandoned cabins, and other items of interest. 

The methods of wayfinding on river trips have improved over the years, but since river runners are an inherently anti-tech crowd (at least when they’re on the river), and tech gadgets typically don’t mix well with water, paper maps and guidebooks are still relevant for most river runners. That said, some new river map apps offer pertinent information to rafters and paddlers and are worth checking out: RiverMaps on Avenza, GoRafting river maps on FarOut, and Whitewater.Guide, a slick native app on Android or iOS that offers many river maps of the world.

Here’s our take on the best river maps of the U.S. and the world, digital apps that provide offline river maps, and other guides, including some classic books that will provide hours of entertainment (and some good how-to advice) on and off the river. We’ll start with the hot new tech options and work our way back in time to our favorite William Nealy guidebook—decidedly undigital, it’s nearly completely hand-drawn and hand-lettered. (Note that this post includes some affiliate links.)

Collage of river guides and river guide digit app on iPhone

How to use digital river map applications 

River map apps display maps of the river corridor with detailed information that’s important to river runners (rapids, hikes, campsites) on your smartphone. You download the river map to your phone while you have cell service. When you’re on the river, the app uses your device’s GPS capabilities to show you where you are, and the river map information gives you contextual information about the features of interest. The currently available apps offering river maps for popular recreational paddling stretches in the  U.S. and the world are available as a native app (in the case of Whitewater.Guide) on iOS or Android smartphones or through general outdoor adventure apps such as FarOut (in the case of GoRafting) or the Avenza app (RiverMaps).

How do I download the river map?

First, you need to download the river guide app that offers the map you want to buy. Go to the relevant app store for your phone, download the app (Far Out for the GoRafting maps, or Avenza for RiverMaps, or Whitewater.guide), then choose and purchase the river maps you want. 

How do I locate the river maps I want in the app?

If you’re purchasing RiverMaps through the Avenza app, click on the store icon at the bottom of your phone screen and search for “rivermaps” or you can use the QR code on their web site, which takes you directly to the maps in the app. For the maps on FarOut, just click on the store icon and search by the river name.

How much do the river map apps cost?

Cost varies depending on the river map you’re buying, and both RiverMaps and GoRafting offer river map bundles. Most maps for individual sections range from less than $5 to less than $40.

Will Gaia or onX apps show river maps?

Gaia and onX apps are generally useful for outdoor adventurers, but aren’t geared toward paddlers in particular.

  • Gaia features trail maps curated by National Geographic experts, and the app includes U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Services (USGS) topographic maps. With the free version of the app, you get basic maps, you can record your activities, and you can create routes. For less than $5 a month, you can get 300-plus maps, the ability to download info so you can use it offline, and additional weather and terrain features. Although Gaia lists water sports such as kayaking and canoeing as activities of interest that you can select, searches such as “Westwater Canyon” brought up the Westwater Canyon study area rather than information about paddling it. It’s just not geared toward boaters. For hikers, it has a gold mine of information, including scores of user comments and ratings for specific trail sections. It is useful for fishing in some regions: Gaia introduced a fishing layer for Colorado that covers sections of the Colorado River, Arkansas River, South Platte River, Blue River, Roaring Fork, and Fryingpan Rivers. The layer includes info about banks, recreation areas, access points, and adjacent ponds and lakes. It also includes names and ratings of rapids, stream gauge sites to check current flows, land ownership boundaries, and recreation sites. 
  • onX is targeted to hunters who want to research information such as groundcover that’s conducive to their prey as well as property ownership boundaries—including the names of the property owners—and current legal hunting areas. onX will show you rivers, but you won’t get paddling-specific information. 

Let’s get to the guides that are most useful for river runners.

RiverMaps guide books

RiverMaps took the basic concept of putting river maps alongside descriptions of features and added some simple improvements that made their guides ubiquitous on every river trip I’ve been on in the last decade. RiverMaps guides, written by some combination of Duwain Whitis, Barbara Vinson, and Tom Martin, cover more than a dozen of the most popular multi-day river trips in the U.S. West, including Grand Canyon, Middle Fork of the Salmon, and the Rogue. The game-changers with RiverMaps guides include water-resistant and tear-resistant paper, a large format, and orientation of the river from bottom to top so when you’re looking at it, river right on the page is river right in real life. The right page displays the river map and the left side provides photos from that section as well as  information about corresponding campsites, rapids, points of interest, and hikes.

RiverMaps are spiral-bound, so they can be laid out and strapped on the dry box or cooler in front of the raft rower. The format is large—12 inches by 14 inches—and the map scale is 2000 feet per inch, so you can glean information even as you’re floating. They survive a surprising amount of water: If the book gets completely submerged, it will recover if you keep pulling the pages apart gently as they dry, and keep it out of direct sunlight.

RiverMaps include detailed information about the rivers, including permit information, answers to frequently asked questions, local emergency contact information, an overview of the geology of the river environment, and the archeology and history of the area. 

RiverMaps Arkansas River guide interior page
RiverMaps guides read from the bottom up, so the river is oriented the same way you’re looking at, with narrative info on the lefthand page

Digital RiverMaps through Avenza

RiverMaps on Avenza provide the river corridor map and the info on those pages—but not the extensive descriptions of rapids and campsites that you see in the left side of the spread in the book. Also, because the maps are essentially PDF versions of what’s in the book, the download files are so big they’re divided into individual sections. For example, the San Juan guide is delivered in 5 separate maps that total 335MB and take a few minutes to download.

Although you can’t see the additional description on the digital version of RiverMaps, if you already have the printed guide, the ideal scenario would be to pair that with the app so you can use the GPS to confirm your location.

RiverMaps digital app screenshot of San Juan River
RiverMaps digital app on Avenza shows the maps with features of interest marked but not the detailed descriptions that are included in the printed guides

Here are quick links to buy RiverMaps on Amazon (affiliate links), or you can purchase directly from the RiverMaps site with a PayPal account.

What RiverMaps guides are best for

For paddlers who want to leave their phones turned off but want a rich source of information on the river, RiverMaps water-resistant guidebooks are the gold standard. By pairing these with the app, you’ll have the additional comfort that comes with using the GPS locator to confirm your position while using the books for more detailed information. Downside of the digital map version is you need to download multiple files to form a complete river guide, and the files are huge.

GoRafting river guides on FarOut 

GoRafting.com offers web-based written guides for many popular multi-day and day-trip river sections in the U.S. and worldwide that are useful for pre-trip planning. But they also offer excellent digital river guides on the FarOut app (affiliate link), an outdoor adventure app that includes hiking and biking guides in addition to GoRafting’s whitewater guides.

The FarOut app interface is easy to use (more intuitive than Avenza), and the layout of the river guide information is clean and easily readable. Various icons are used for features including campsites, rapids, surf spots, access points, bridges, waterfalls, and points of interest. Rapid classes are marked with the number on the icon. When you click on an icon, more information pops up. Especially useful is a graphic indicator at the bottom of each point of interest that lets you know how far you are from the next campsite or rapid. 

GoRafting app icons indicate whitewater ratings, campsites, points of interest (hikes, petroglyphs), and bridges

Descriptions of the rapids are concise but packed with information, and include different instructions for different water levels, which is particularly helpful on rivers like the Middle Fork of the Salmon where the level of difficulty changes dramatically at different flows. The free sample guide to the Nugget section of the Rogue River has some great photos of the rapids—some of the guides include more guides than others.

GoRafting guide for the Nugget section of the Rogue includes great photos of Nugget Rapid

One of  my favorite features is the campsite information, especially when photos are included, as with many of the campsite descriptions for the Ruby-Horsethief section of the Colorado River. On Ruby-Horsethief, you choose your campsites in advance of the trip, so these photos would be useful for researching good campsites for your group size. For rivers where you don’t have designated campsites—Grand Canyon comes to mind—being able to see photos of campsites you’re considering, along with notes about the group size the camp will accommodate and the likelihood of shade, plus an accurate understanding of how far it would be to the next campsite, would be a huge advantage.

GoRafting digital guide on FarOut of Ruby-Horsethief section of the Colorado includes useful photos of camps

When you purchase a map, you’ll have the option to download various map layers: an OpenTopoMap.org, USGS National Map, and USGS Satellite map, each of which are 4MB or less for the 4.7-mile Nugget section on the Rogue River. You can download all these map types and switch between them when you’re on the river without cell service or an internet connection.

Check out the GoRafting.com site to see all their guides (including written guides that aren’t yet available through FarOut). GoRafting guides cover many of the popular western U.S. multi-day trips as well as river sections in Chile, Costa Rica, Iceland, and New Zealand. Here are quick links (affiliate links) to some of the GoRafting guides on FarOut (you’ll find more in the app store):

What GoRafting guides are best for

GoRafting whitewater digital guides on the FarOut app provide the best digital app experience for paddlers running multi-day trips on some of the most popular river stretches in the U.S., Chile, Patagonia, Iceland, and New Zealand. The app is user-friendly and the information is tailored to the information river runners need about rapids, campsites, hikes, and other points of interest. Especially for paddlers who are using offline functions of their phones on the river anyway (photos, for example), the digital GoRafting river guides pack a ton of essential information into a tiny, useful package. 

Whitewater.guide

Our last contender in the river running guide roundup is a native app for iOS and Android called Whitewater.guide, developed by Mike Krutyansky, kayaker and founder of a Russian whitewater school, and Konstantin Kuznetsov, a kayaker and professional software developer. This app, geared to day boaters rather than multi-trip river runners, is a truly international guide: Although the U.S. coverage continues to expand, it’s fairly sparse for now. But the information available for rivers worldwide is astounding, with full coverage for Scotland, Quebec in Canada, Galicia, Portugal, South Pyrenees, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Iceland, various countries in Asia, and Uganda. The app also includes what it terms “medium quality of content” for British Columbia, Costa Rica, the Alps, Northern Pyrenees, Finland, New Zealand, and more. It’s exhilarating just to browse through the whitewater possibilities in places you hadn’t considered paddling. 

All those blue markers are sections of whitewater described in the Whitewater.guide app

The Whitewater.guide app has two big differentiators: 1) A powerful filter so you can sort river stretches by criteria such as level of difficulty or lack of portages and 2) its inclusion of real-time flow information where available. 

Whitewater.guide river descriptions include an overview with best season to run, length of the run, water source, whitewater ratings, and links to the put-in and take-out locations

To find a river in the app, you can sort by region or use the search tool. Rivers of interest to paddlers are marked on high-level maps, and you can drill down to see details for each section. The information card for each river stretch includes—in one view—the difficulty, quality rating, duration (how long it takes to run it), elevation drop, distance, season, put-in and take-out points, kayaking types (for example, “bedrock” or “creeking”), and river supply (love this detail, as it specifies “Rains” or other sources of water). The descriptions are attributed to the source, which includes individual boaters and third-party guidebooks. User submissions and suggestions for edits are moderated by the app developers. 

Detail in the Whitewater.guide apps includes river supply details and kayaking types

What the Whitewater.guide app is best for

For paddlers outside the U.S., especially kayakers looking for day runs, this app seems indispensable for quickly locating and researching a river section that meets your criteria. Standout features are its ease of use, inclusion of water flow levels, and search criteria. Plus, the app is free! Here’s a link to the Whitewater.guide website, or you can find it in your app store.  

Classic river guides to treasure

In addition to checking out new-fangled digital river guide apps, treasure the old classics if you still have them (or can find them online). The photos, descriptions, and general vibe of some of these books evoke another time. 

A few of my favorites (some of these are affiliate links):

  • Whitewater Home Companion: Southeastern Rivers, Volume II by William Nealy: Just one in Nealy’s series of wildly entertaining and uniquely instructive guides, this classic includes descriptions (and detailed drawings) of rapids, tips on how to survive holes and breaking waves, and an exposition on the high brace vs. low brace debate. Hand-lettered, with detailed drawings of rapids, every spread in a William Nealy book is a work of art. Released in 1984, this was my bible back in the day when I spent a lot of time on Southeastern rivers. Even though I haven’t been on a river back there for years, I periodically re-read this for sheer delight.
Drawings and commentary from William Nealy
  • Belknap’s Waterproof Desolation River Guide by Buzz Belknap and Loie Belknap Evans: We’ve bought countless copies of this one because it kept disappearing into the hands of fellow boaters on Deso trips—our go-to destination for family river trips. Yes, newer guides are more usable but they don’t have fascinating stories (and photos!) of dead outlaws. 
  • Floater’s Guide to Colorado by Doug Wheat—Short on maps and typically just a paragraph or two about each stretch, for a while this book, released in 1984, was about the only one that covered Colorado whitewater.
  • Rivers of the Southwest: The Boater’s Guide to the Rivers of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona by Fletcher Anderson and Ann Hopkinson: This gem has solid information about all the fun rivers throughout the Southwest along with commentary about the culture of paddling, including this cutting observation about Aspen: “It has the highest per capita sales of Hollowform Kayaks, but so few expert kayakers that it is easier to list their names than count them. A new kayak is more chic than a Gucci handbag, but actually paddling it is not mellow.” 

Collect all the river guides

River guides—either on paper or on your phone—are relatively inexpensive compared to other items in most boaters’ mountain of gear. I recommend getting as many perspectives as you can on rivers you’re evaluating. Buy the apps, buy the books, research runs on YouTube. All will give you an edge out on the water.

Reading about Deso in the Belknap guide

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