AR Ramblings

Matt mentioned in a blog post that he estimated the total elevation gain of the BMT to be around 50,000 feet.  That is a big number.  Spreading it across almost 300 miles helps, but that is still a hell of a lot of climbing.

Today, it occurred to me that the KML file I used to create my GPS tracking map also contained elevation for each of the points.  I hacked up a quick script to parse all 12,000+ data points and add up the cumulative gain.  After triple-checking the logic in my script, I felt this really, really terrible sinking feeling in my gut.  I just stared at the screen in disbelief.

:~/Desktop/BMT$ ./calc_elevation.pl
Total gain = 22325.804708 meters : 73247.3908856141 feet

In my past experience, GPS units have had notoriously large margins of error when it comes to elevation readings.  I can only hope that a little bit of that error is inflating the result.  If not, this might take a little longer than I have originally estimated!