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!
I demand a hand recount!
I got my figure from counting every little bump on this profile: http://runthebmt.wikispaces.com/file/view/BMT-OverviewMap.pdf
I sure hope my figure is closer to reality.