Two-Heel Drive, a Hiking Blog

This is the Big Moment for those of us in the Everytrail Guides Authors Guild (created right here as of this moment, I suppose): Guides are now available on the iPhone (via Everytrail Free and Everytrail Pro).

I wish I could brag that I was the most prolific Guide author, but that honor goes to Stuart at Trailspotting, who has left the rest of us in the dust with guides for Hawaii, Lassen Volcanic National Park and a host of High Sierra locales.

This feels very much like the day back in about 1996 when I realized I could learn to create Web pages. Not like being present at the Creation or any such hype — just a sense of being part of something that was going to be huge.

I felt the same thing the first time I noodled around with my iPhone just two summers ago. When the founder of Everytrail dropped me a note last summer asking if I’d like to be a part of this plan to create location-aware, GPS-enabled travel guides, it took about a half-second to say “when do I start?” (didn’t hurt that my so-called newspaper career perished practically the same day).

In 10 years every amusement park, shopping mall and museum will be using this kind of technology to help people find their way (to the bathroom, mainly); it’ll be as second-nature as GPS guidance systems in cars.

Everytrail hopes people will pony up $1.99 for the privilege of using Guides on their iPhones. I can’t imagine outrageous fortunes flowing from that trickle of a revenue stream, but the technology is so new that nobody really knows where it’s going.

I have no illusions about the hurdles Everytrail has to overcome: I hiked every weekend for half a decade without once using a GPS unit, much less a GPS travel guide. Furthermore, the very idea of taking an iPhone into the wilderness is a huge conceptual leap: after all, it’s a cell phone. Why would you take it where there’s no cell service? Legions of inventors have seen their brilliant, world-shattering ideas wallow in obscurity — just because people can do something does not mean they will.

For now, though, it just feels good to be there at the start of something really cool.

Incidentally, these are my most recent Guides:

• Best San Francisco Day Trips — a bundle including Angel Island, the city waterfront, Marin Headlands and Bay Area scenic drives.
• 
  Great East Bay Day Hikes. Sunol, Briones, Mission Peak, Mount Diablo, Murietta Falls.
• Best strenuous hikes in the Bay Area. Berry Creek Falls, Murietta Falls, Mount Sizer at Henry Coe, North Peak at Mount Diablo.

The Guides project also has a couple new partners of note: Fodors, creator of many tourism guides; and Trail Kilkenny, with Guides to the land of my ancestors in the Emerald Isle.

So when do I start penning Guides on trails a bit closer to home? Soon, but I’d like to have hiked a trail at least twice before committing it to Guide status. I’m having so much fun finding new trails that it’s hard to get charged up about returning to places I’ve already been. If you’ve put up with me this long, a little longer won’t hurt.

I’m still contributing to the Guides project at Everytrail.com, which has signed up a half-dozen “partners” besides me to develop GPS-enhanced travel content. For now they’re nice resources for Web travelers, but in the future they’ll be available for download to iPhones and Android phones, so you can, for instance, track your progress up Half Dome (assuming the cables are up and you’ve reserved your spot).

Mine are all grouped at my partner page. Current count: 31. Other partners:
(more…)

Joost Schreve, CEO of EveryTrail.com, hired me to write more than two-dozen “Guides,” for his site, which allows the GPS-enabled to record their adventures with words, pictures and GPS waypoints.

Now Joost and his team are building a second tier at EveryTrail: guides full of travel tips and outings with turn-by-turn directions that people will be able to access either online or via iPhones and Blackberrys. EveryTrail, based in Palo Alto, CA, decided to test the concept in its own back yard.

My job was to provide a kind of digital putty that could be molded into whatever model makes sense as the project evolves. We decided on three kinds of guides, running from general to specific, mainly built around hiking.

(more…)

Posting GPS mash-ups of my hikes at EveryTrail has been an education in the law of unintended consequences.

Consumer GPS units came to market to do for all Americans what they once did only for the military: help navigate unfamiliar terrain. And since then, consumer GPS receivers have added ever more ways to help people navigate via satellite.

And then there’s EveryTrail: nobody there uses GPS to navigate. Most, like me, use it as a kind of electronic notebook to tell me how far we’ve gone, how high we’ve climbed. I’ve never used my GPS to navigate. Really, not even once. Perhaps the coolest manifestation of GPS users taking the future into their own hands: creating art by walking down city streets. (More on this at the New York Times, for those who missed it a few weeks back.)

(more…)

I’ve finally gotten a GPS unit, and getting it to play nice with my iMac has been an education. The unit is a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx, which is being phased out in favor of the Vista HCX, which is supposed to work much better in deep tree cover.

All GPS units do the same thing: pick up signals from satellites. All work pretty much the same in recording a track of everywhere you go. The trick for dirt-walkers of our ilk is getting the track out of the unit and pasted onto some kind of electronic map so you can show everybody else where you hiked. The Vista Cx has a USB cable that connects to a chip on the unit; it contains files with .gpx extensions that contain tracks, routes and waypoints. Plug in your unit and launch some GPS connection software, hit the “import” command and voila, your track is on your Mac. (See my technical note at the bottom for more on how this works on Garmin units).

Pretty much any GPS unit with a USB connection should be able to communicate with a Mac (and a PC for that matter, but I’ll stick to what I know here; the concepts are the same regardless of which OS drives your computer). There are commercial Mac-specific GPS programs out there (here’s a list at the site of the makers of GPSy) but I always start out by tracking down the best free stuff.

I have one primary use in mind for my unit: slapping a hiking track onto a Google terrain map for posting here (I’ll get all geocachey someday; Keep in mind it took me four years to try orienteering). Google terrain maps are the closest free thing to having the shaded-relief cartography we usually have to pay for. They depict changing terrain far more graphically (and usefully) than Google Earth images. They are lame substitutes for professionally produced maps — with essential details like identifying trails you didn’t use — but they can be thrown together pretty quickly and e-mailed to your hiking cronies. What I’ve learned so far:

• EveryTrail.com is very handy. This site allows you to import your GPS tracks and photos from the same site, and can match time stamps to place pictures at key places along the way. It also has easy imports from Flickr. Here’s one I did at Mission Peak yesterday. Here’s the map I created:

Horse Heaven Trail to Mission Peak Summit at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail.

• GPSvisualizer is a great companion to EveryTrail. You upload your tracks to the site and choose one of a zillion options for making the map just the way you like it. When you’ve got your map done, you can import it directly into EveryTrail.
• GPS Photo Linker is a handy free app for adding geographic data to your photos. EveryTrail also will do this but I had better luck with Photo Linker. Just drag the photos you want to add to your hike into a window on Photo Linker, and click some buttons to add the data to your pictures. Upload to Flickr and import into EveryTrail and you’re all set.
• LoadMyTracks can fetch tracks from your GPS or from a GPS file and then it does something cool: offers the option of uploading them directly to GPS Photo Linker, which makes it all that much quicker to build an EveryTrail project.
• RoadTrip from Garmin is an essential free app for Mac users. It lets you import and export tracks, either directly from your GPS unit or from a file. I used it to create the track above, which was imported into Photo Linker and GPS Visualizer.
• GPS Babel is must-own freeware for everybody — even if you don’t own a GPS unit, you can use it to download other people’s tracks and translate the data into KML files that can be imported into Google Earth for all kinds of fun and games, such as:

  

  Google Earth lets you save your creations as an image that can easily be uploaded into Flickr or other sites.

• Google Maps allows a GPS layer — you have to create your KML file and upload it somewhere. Instructions here.
• Technical note for Garmin users: If you plug your unit into your Mac’s USB port, all you have to do is launch Garmin RoadTrip or pretty much any other GPS application to communicate with the GPS unit. There is an option to mount the internal memory chip to the desktop (as a disk called “no name”), but making the chip accessible to the desktop blocks it from talking to most GPS apps. I got ahead of myself in reading the instructions and thought I had to mount the chip to the desktop to communicate with my eTrex — but doing so interrupted most up/downloads (it would download tracks via RoadTrip, but no routes or waypoints, and wouldn’t connect at all with the other apps). The unit’s much smarter than I expected it to be.

Those are the basics. Share any additions or insights in the comments.

Links:

• Macworld’s guide to GPS units.
• Trailspotting’s intro to GPS.