[pct-l] elevation change

[Brick Robbins <brick@fastpack.com>]

Spent Sunday in Wrightwood with the Owens.

One interesting piece of data that I gathered was their annoyance that the data points in the guidebooks were way too far apart, much further than the AT or CDT guidebooks have them.

This results in "hidden" climbs and descents the exist between the data points.

Craig's program 
http://www.newestindustry.com/pct/pctplan/pctplan.html
uses the data from the guidebooks, so it reflects the not-so-accurate data.

Jim compared the elevation gains tabulated by Craig's program with those recorded by Jim's altimeter.
FWIW, Jim is a pretty detail oriented Aerospace engineer, so he took into account (as much as possible) the things that effect altimeters.

Here are the results

Leg                         Planner          Altimeter
Campo-Laguna         5485             8050
Laguna - WarnerS    3500             17210
WarnerS-Idyllwild      10211           19820
Idyllwild-BigBear       12307           34950
BigBear-Wrightwood  8090             22440

As you can see, the total elevation gain produced by the planning program may be off by as much as a factor of 3 or 4

Side Note: Jim says he was privy to the calculations of the AT total elevation change used by the ATC, and that those numbers were guest-imated by WingFoot based on some faulty assumptions and are totally bogus, so the comparison of trails based on these two bogus numbers is an exercise in futility.

-Brick

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