I use an Oregon 750 for multi-day backcountry hikes. I have a route, usually created by studying the relevant maps or converting the track of someone I trust (basecamp and/or mapsource). I navigate this route using "direct" routing as there are generally no trails recognized by any maps I have (this is the case in many parts of Canada). My route then consists of a number of viapoints simply telling me when I change direction and waypoints which I use to mark possible camping spots, river crossings etc. If I make a single route of the whole trip, I am able to tell the distance to destination (which is the end of the trip and could be several days in the future) and the distance to the next via-/way-point (which seem to be treated in exactly the same way) which could be in only 20 metres. Interesting to know but often I really want to be able to choose to know the distance/ETA etc. to the planned camping spot for tonight or the river crossing and hence show progress towards that waypoint.

If I go into "Active route" and navigate to an intermediate waypoint, instead of navigating via the current route, the device simply gives me a direct bearing to the waypoint which could be directly across an impassable obstacle and certainly not along the trail/route I will be following. Note that with any other kind of routing in force one gets a dynamically updating list of waypoints and distances to same; with direct routing one gets merely a list of waypoints/viapoints a red pennant against the next waypoint/viapoint and that is it. In any case, one would have to scroll through a large number of viapoints before one got to the waypoint of interest. This is not at all useful. (Note that "lock on road" is, of course, off.)

If one could get the info that one does for other types of routing and be able to filter out the viapoints/shaping points (or whatever Garmin calls them) then that, indeed, would be close to what I need.

The way that I have (partially) got around this up to now is to split the route into what I think will be daily segments so that I can navigate towards the destination for the day but if there are actually multiple points of interest along the way or we have a great day and want to go further this is quite cumbersome.

The easiest solution would be to be able to simply set a particular intermediate waypoint as the temporary "destination" and navigate along the route to that point. Is this possible when using "direct" routing with a lot of viapoints?

A related nice feature to have would be to be able to set data fields in the trip computer (map, compass) to distance to a chosen waypoint. Is this possible (perhaps someone has written an app to do this?)?

I wonder if any of this is configurable in Settings or is there magic that one can put in the xml/gpx file for the route that is loaded into the GPS that would affect its behaviour?

If it's relevant I use classic mode.

Any ideas/help much appreciated. Apologies for the long post.