IvyMike

Sycamore Canyon Hike

I took Friday off and hiked through Sycamore Canyon, a 16- mile round-trip hike in the Point Mugu State Park in Southern California. It was quite a bit longer than my normal hikes, and I thought I was sore after the hike. As it turns out, that was child's play compared to when I woke up this morning. The link on the photo goes to a (soon-to-be-annotated) Flickr gallery of photos from the hike.

Here's what my Forerunner 201 GPS had to say:

• 17.93 Miles in 5 Hours, 18 Minutes (I took a wrong turn at one point, turning a 16 mile hike into an 18 mile hike)
  

And the heart rate monitor:

• Average 140 BPM
• I was in my heart rate zone for 4:40:09 (between 132 and 172 bpm)
• 4908 Kcal (!)

I spent a few hours today writing a python script to massage my GPS data into a format I liked for Google Earth. Google Earth will import the data directly from the GPS unit, but it's not quite what I want, since it imports all data from my GPS as a single track, not split into separate hikes. Google Earth uses GPS Babel to communicate with the GPS, but it just doesn't know about the Forerunner-specific extensions. In the end, I used Garmin's own software to download the data and export into Garmin's custom XML format, and then my script massaged that into a Google Earth KMZ file, with each hike showing up as a separate "Placemark". (The KMZ file includes local hikes from the last few months.)

Tags: hike,hiking, SoCal, Thousand Oaks, Ventura County

posted by IvyMike @ 7/31/2005 01:04:00 AM