Elevation gain - I am sorry, but I am totally ignorant of how one calculates elevation gain. Shouldn't that be simply the gain from very top to where you start the trail, regardless how many up and down you go along the way?

let's say you follow a trail that has three 300m high hills to go over and loops back to the starting point. is your total elevation gain 0m, 300m, or 900m?

how is this different than going up one 300m high hill three times (say Pump Peak) on three different days in terms of total elevation gain?

The point I noticed was for the Central Cheam Range trail. You go up Airplane Creek Road, not gaining much elevation, and then lose ~200m to cross the creek, then gain all your elevation to the highpoint. To my way of thinking, if your minimum elevation is 200m lower than your start elevation, from this low to the high point should be the elevation gain reported on the trail statistic, because you actually do climb that much.

The age old debate of elevation gain vs accumulated elevation gain. I know in terms of hiking, knowing the accumulated gain is a good stat - otherwise some trails might look quite deceiving. The trick, as ShadowChaser points out, is having a relatively accurate way of recording this. Unless people have an altimeter that they use to actually track the changes, can we capture this info? I think using a non electronic way, i.e. gut feel, would be grossly inaccurate and then could be misleading the other way. We're open to suggestions though if anyone has a clever solution!

I know when we did st helens, I kept a gps track of the entire circuit, and later calculated the accumulated elevation gain. There was a big difference there between the trail stats and what we actually did. That's not possible on a lot of trails because of dense tree cover - but is becoming more possible with improved gps technology. Clever solution? New gps. Okay - not overly clever.

Did I just hear Jimbo offer to buy me a new GPS? Thanks Jimbo. []

Does that free GPS offer extend to anyone who's entering trails, cuz I've already started....

Damn - let the surprise slip. Will have to think of something else to get you instead now...

How 'bout a preview button? Or did I miss it?

Also, I notice on one trail a link to 'nearby trails'...... can't access it on the edit page to tag a few others. Or did I miss that too?

Looks great guys!

No preview button yet, sorry.

The nearby trails feature is done via GPS coordinates - once trailhead GPS coordinates get added for trails it automatically gets calculated.

Would it be too difficult/ugly to have both a elevation change field and a cumulative elevation gain field? And leave it up to the users to enter one or both? That seems like it would simply give both groups the information they prefer..

Hey, just stumbled into this discussion... it's a question I've asked myself a few times, esp. last year because my personal goal was to gain 'an Everest' worth of hiking/scrambles.

How about we report both methods of elev. gain calculation?

1) A 'Traditional' measure, perhaps as start-max or min-max as discussed.

2) A super-granular view of GPS track data, either as text or just a screen-scrape.

I posted some examples in the Alta TR thread for a recent snowshoe to Rawson Lake:

Actual Garmin file format:
http://members.shaw.ca/noser/gps/Raw...20Snowshoe.gdb

Same data, in text (could be parsed and displayed by the site):
http://members.shaw.ca/noser/gps/Raw...20Snowshoe.txt

Or just a picture of the route, then folks could decide for themselves if the route was hard or not:
http://members.shaw.ca/noser/gps/Raw...COCProfile.jpg

Note: I'm not actually sure the small section of map is copyright-OK, but the profile window should be fine.

I suggest this because for quick-and-dirty math you want to use the first kind of number, maybe for tracking stats and so on.

But I agree with Dru, a lot of routes can really surprise you. Moose Mtn, close to Calgary is like this. It's not at all hard, until you are almost back at the car and realize that you have this elevation gain you forgot you had to do, just to 'gain the parking lot'. []

Plus my web space isn't unlimited, and posting the gps tracks here makes more sense to me.

This is just a suggestion, but having the "BC Rockies", mixed up with the Kootenays, doesn't make much sense. Why not have the Rockies, and the Columbias separate? Or even Purcells, Selkirks separate again?

Plus, there is some out-dated info in the Kootenays section - the Joker trails are all inaccessible as the logging road access is out at about km 8 and has been out for about 8 years. (The area is also closed for grizzly management)

Regardless of whether or not a trail is closed, they will be added to and remain in the wiki for historical and access reasons. You're welcome to edit the entry and update it with more recent information.

I disagree about the Kootenays / BC Rockies separation. It might be different for the locals, but most people consider the Kootenays region to go right up to the Alberta border. As with the Cariboo/Chilcotin area, there are no real fixed borders.

Separating the area might make the problem worse and confuse people more. That said, was there a specific reason you wanted the regions separate? Is it too difficult to find information near you?

If I go to http://www.kootenays-bc.com/maps.html, their map seems to concur. Also see http://www.kootenayrockies.com/, http://www.hellobc.com/en-CA/Regions...nayRockies.htm, etc.

Everything is open to debate, but I think we already have too many regions for BC. Idealy I'd like 6-8 regions per province, state, or territory.

No, I don't really care. I don't use the trail wiki anyway. I just have this pet peeve about the "Kootenay Rockies" 'cos the mountains in BC are the Columbias, not the Rockies - but it's your database, you should do what you want.

The reason I mentioned the closed trails was that the way they read now, it looks as if you could just drive up and start hiking and people might be in for a big surprise.

That's unfortunate.

The idea was that it's referring to a region, not a mountain range. I agree with you on the "Kootenays BC Rockies" pet peeve, but I purposely put a slash in between them to signify "and / or".

As far as I'm concerned, the database is part of the community. It's not mine.

It's a wiki - it's designed to be edited. We can't know everything about the trails - if you find incorrect information, the only way it's going to become correct is by (you) editing it.