I’m all for more information, but do you actually use the altitude profile in your MTB trail guidebook?

How do you use it?

What’s good and bad?

How could it be better?

Hwyl!

Pete

Guidebook?

I do use the profiles from mapping programs to get an idea of how decent a ride will be.I like climbs.

How accurate are they?
Did a (road) ride in the peaks recently, friend’s garmin suggested that we had climbed approx 6,500ft and decended around 5,700ft. We started and finished at the same place.

GPS is rubbish at accurate altitude measurements.. Especially if it’s adding up incremental changes like that. What’s weirder is that if you check the actual route, the start and end alt will still be the same.

And as to route profiles, I find them good to estimate how long is still to go, as they help me remember the map.

When you upload to garmin connect and enable “elevation corrections” the anomalies mostly become minimal. What it does is convert the measured alt to known alt measurements taken from surveys on the ground, still subject to error tho.

I use them to compare the difficulty of various loops when I talk people through rides that I might take them on. Pretty useful for that.