Big hike and cool hiking trail sharing technology

Yesterday the kids I decided to go back to Grafton Notch State Park to hike the Eyebrow Trail. They were motivated to hike the mountain they saw across Route 26 when we were on top of Table Rock last week.

I had asked my friend Carl how challenging the Eyebrow was and he said it was steeper than Table Rock (and we thought that one was a challenge). But the kids wanted to give it a whirl before our fall schedule kept us from visiting the park again this season.

And yup, it was a really steep climb! There were several areas with ropes to grab on to to pull yourself up the trail.

And some metal railings to hold on to on the open rock face area (this particular spot made the kids really nervous but once they got over the shock of the drop, they did great).

And then it went up - and up - some more.

The elevation gain for the mile it took to get to our lunch spot (pretty much at the top) was about 1,200 feet. That was the most gain the kids had ever done in that mileage and although they were tired at the top, they were really pleased with their accomplishment.

We enjoyed lunch with a beautiful view.

And waved to the Table Rock trail across the way.

I had brought along our GPS unit, not to find geocaches, but to try a new website - everytrail.com my friend Lisa told me about. The site lets you save your 'tracks' (the path you hiked that you can save on the unit) and upload it. You can also add waypoints and photos so you can really share a comprehensive view of the trail. Basically, it's a free mapping program that sounded like a great resource. It could also be a great site for people looking for trails but aren't sure what the area is like if people share their info there.

And as I've admitted many times before, I'm a geek. This kind of site is totally up my alley, especially because it turned out to be really easy to use. I connected my GPS unit to my computer, opened a free interface software program from the site and it did the rest.

Then I added photos to the waypoints I had taken (the software matched the waypoints to my tracks automatically so adding photos was all that I needed to do). And voila, it was done!

What I thought was even cooler was the fact that they had code to paste into my blog (just like YouTube).




The kids have plans to save more tracks to our GPS to make their own maps on the site this fall.

If you give it a try, let us know so we can check it out!