About OpenAir Tools

Open Air Tools was created by Stephen Ross to share — freely — the computational tools he has built across forty-five years in the outdoors. Organising one of the UK's most technically demanding mountain races, originating award-winning guidebooks, founding a data-driven running app: each demanded tools that didn't yet exist, so he built them.

AI has accelerated much of this work, and Stephen uses it extensively — but the tools are only ever as good as the experience behind them and the judgement of the person using them. Open Air pairs what these tools do well with the insight that only a lifetime outdoors can bring. The most important human in that equation is you, the person about to head out. Everything here is free to use.

Stephen has run and walked thousands of miles, and distilled that into the bestselling Big Trails guidebook series (Vertebrate Publishing), covering nearly 100 of the best trails across the UK and central Europe. He organises the Saunders Lakeland Mountain Marathon, a two-day Lake District event known for demanding the highest standards of route planning and navigation, and founded the running app Skamper — out of which the terrain-adjusted grading work on this site grew. He has run the Cumbria Way and Dales Way in single efforts, though his favourite trail remains the GR221 in Mallorca, which he has walked in both directions more times than is strictly sensible.

Open Air Tools is built with a team of contributors:

Richard is a professional cartographer with over two decades in route design and mapping — the Tour du Mont Blanc, South Downs Way and West Highland Way among them — and has planned thousands of running routes for Skamper, making him the mapping mind behind much of the route data here. Away from the desk he's taken on the Lake District 3000ers in a single day, raced the Yorkshire 3 Peaks, and mountain-biked the Isle of Man end to end.

Rob has ridden the unsupported Transcontinental Race across Europe, raced the Japanese Odyssey around Japan, and run the Spine Challenger along the Pennine Way — though what he loves most is simply being out on the trail (a highlight: grizzly bears on the Skyline Trail in Jasper). He has spent twenty years in the outdoor world as a strategist and brand leader, and builds technology to help more people get outside.

Kirsty came to long-distance trails through ultrarunning, finishing the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc and the Tor des Géants and running Wainwright's Coast to Coast in under three days — though she enjoys the training, planning and route recces even more than the races themselves. She is commissioning editor at Vertebrate Publishing, developing guidebooks that pair practical guidance with beautiful mapping.

Elise is a writer who loves any excuse to shout about how good it is to be outside. She's the author of Coasting, a memoir of her 5,000-mile self-supported run around the British coast, and Walk Britain, a guide to 90 car-free routes. These days she favours trails that take rather less than ten months, having fastpacked the Tour du Mont Blanc, Cumbria Way and Haute Route; she lives in Cumbria.