Color-coded Elevation of Routes in Google Earth

One of the reasons I was considering a GPS was to get a better picture of the elevation I was gaining on my rides around town. I've learned that most GPS aren't accurate enough to be useful so I looked for alternatives.

Since all my riding is on-road, I can easily create a track of my route using bikely.com, but the elevation information had some problems. Sometimes it wasn't available at all and when it was available, it wasn't always accurate. In any case, I couldn't export the elevation information to make corrections or perform calculations.

I recently learned about an online tool called GPS Visualizer. This has a set of tools that allow working with the tracks created in bikely.com. The result is Google Earth file that shows color-coded elevations along the route set against a 3D view of the earth's surface in reasonably good detail. The file JacksNicakjack.kmz covers the route we rode this past Sunday. Red is the lowest elevation and purple the highest. The ridge along Pebblebrook stands out nicely even without lowering the eye-level so you can see the hills.

I'll post other routes and the steps for creating these files in a later post.