GPS travel

February 21, 2005 10:42 AM

GPS waypoints for hiking, biking and paddling.
posted by atchafalaya (5 comments total)

I've always wanted to do this, but isn't it sort of a rich-folk kind of sport?

Also, I heard that the whole GPS treasure-hunting thing, geocaching, is kind of hard on the environment.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:26 PM on February 21, 2005

Where people live the environment will suffer. Geocaching gets people out and use the parks and open spaces. Sure, some caches cause a "geocaching trail" to form after only a few visitors. If it gets too bad, most considerate cachers will archive the cache. There are of course always some who don't care or have moved on a long time ago.

And geocachers strive to live by the rule of cache in - trash out. Some more than others. Friends who life here in the area since their childhood have said that they have seen more of the hills (caches tend to be always on top of a hill) and parks in one year of caching than they have seen in their whole life before.
posted by nostrada at 12:40 PM on February 21, 2005

“Enter keywords like: country, providence, state, activity and/or file format”

providence? Arrrggh.

Actually, I was hoping there would be graphic maps as well. But at least you can download the gpx file and then plot it on a street map, satellite photo, aerial photo, or topo map with GPS Visualizer. One of my favorite online toys.
posted by Geo at 2:52 PM on February 21, 2005

Cool idea. Now what is needed is "wisdom of the crowds" so anyone can update the files, wikipedia-like.
posted by stbalbach at 5:56 PM on February 21, 2005

Atchafalaya,

You may be interested to know that there is some excellent GPS technology being developed right here at home, in Lafayette. For a relatively old technology, new and novel methods of GPS positioning are surprisingly common. Sub-meter GPS might take a little fun out of Geocaching, but from a technical point of view it is an exciting (and growing) field.
posted by MotorNeuron at 6:24 PM on February 21, 2005