This post at alt.rec.hiking oughta cool your ardor for getting one of those wristwatch-sized doohickies to reveal your altitutde. Seems they require so much fiddling to get an accurate reading that you’d be better off just taking a deep breath and guessing.
Yup, pretty much true. I have one of those wristwatch altimeters and it is astonishingly inaccurate. Depending upon whether my sleeve covers it or not, the reported elevation may swing up and down by hundreds of feet.
One afternoon I was sitting on a very large, immovable boulder beside Yosemite’s 10,300′ Fletcher Lake when I noticed the watch reporting sudden elevation changes of 1000′ or more.
But it does tell time quite nicely…
Dan