Altigraph · View a Strava route without an account
How to view a Strava route without an account
Your race organiser put the course on Strava. You open the link and hit "Log in to see...": the title shows, the track does not. You have no account, or no wish to create one just to look at a map. What Strava does not say: a public route can still be read, without an account, by pasting the link here.
Paste the route link, the profile appears. No account, no sign-up, nothing to install.
Open AltigraphWhy Strava asks you to log in
The strava.com/routes/... page is for members: logged out, Strava shows only the route name and a sign-up button. But the same route, when its creator made it visible to "Everyone", also exists in a form meant to be embedded in other websites (the route's "Embed on your website" button). That embed version contains the whole track with altitudes, and it is public by design: it is the one Altigraph reads.
In practice, a small relay fetches that public page, extracts the points and hands them to your browser, which computes the profile, the gradients and the climbing. Nothing is stored beyond a one-hour cache, no Strava account is used, no private data is touched: what is not public stays unreadable.
What can be read, and what cannot
| Link | Without an account? | Why |
|---|---|---|
Route (/routes/...) visible to "Everyone" | Yes | The normal case for a race course published by an organiser. |
| Private or "Followers only" route | No | It has no public version. Ask the author to set visibility to "Everyone", or for the GPX file. |
Activity (/activities/...) | No | A recorded workout is not a route. From the activity, "Export GPX", then drop the file. |
Segment (/segments/...) | No | A segment has no public version either. |
Short link (strava.app.link/...) | Almost | Open it in your browser and copy the full address, the one ending in /routes/ and a number. |
In thirty seconds
- Copy the route link as the organiser gave it (it looks like
https://www.strava.com/routes/3459581329699663824). - Paste it into the "Strava route link" field on the home page. The profile loads by itself on paste.
- Read: distance, climbing and descent, THE climb and THE descent, the table of sections with average gradient and steepest 100 m, the steepest stretches, the map.
- Send it to your group: "Download the image" makes a 1600 x 900 picture, and "Copy the share link" gives an address that replays the profile for anyone, no account either.
For race organisers
Some of your participants have no Strava account and will never see your course behind the login wall. In the athlete guide, next to the Strava link, add a link of the form https://altigraph.pages.dev/?strava=ROUTEID, where the id is the number at the end of your route's address. Whoever clicks gets the profile, the gradients and the map, on a phone or a computer, without creating anything. The only condition: the route's visibility set to "Everyone".
Why the climbing is not exactly Strava's
Strava and Altigraph start from the same altitudes but do not smooth them the same way. Altigraph smooths over 50 m before adding the ups, which removes the jitter that inflates totals; the result usually lands 5 to 10 % below the quoted figure. The Strava distance is shown next to the computed one. The method is detailed in the page about the elevation profile of a GPX.
Got the link? Paste it, that is all.
View the route without an accountPublished 19 September 2026. Altigraph is not affiliated with Strava; Strava is a trademark of Strava, Inc. The mechanism described relies on the public embed version of routes, as Strava offers it today.