Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Determining Elevation

Before this weekend, I spent time trying to determine if my Memorial Day weekend mountain bike trip to Tahoe would be a bust or not. Word is that snow remains on trails above 7000'. Yet we had planned rides at or near that elevation.

To determine if we would be skunked on our ride, I launched Google Earth and navigated to the area. Simply by mousing over particular locations, I could view exact elevations at the bottom of the 3D viewer (see image).

In the end, we aborted our Tahoe trip and stuck to lower elevation rides. This was unfortunate, but certainly not as bad as wasting hours of driving only to find a wall of snow across our favorite trails.

4 comments:

Wil said...

I used to do this all the time -- use Google Earth to find the elevation. But in my newest version of GE, the elevation no longer shows up my status bar... What gives? Also, they took away the tilt control, which used to be on-screen, and now is hidden in a special mouse maneuver. In addition, the status bar used to tell me a percentage of what had been downloaded for my current view. That's gone too. Ugh.

John said...

The elevation should show in the center of the bottom of the V4.3 screen. Be sure that Google Earth is set to display this information (View > Status bar).

spike said...
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spike said...

To see elevation, you have to check "Terrain" - it's the last item in the "Layers" side-bar window.