Creating a new route elevation is off by tens of thousands
I'm trying to create a new off trail route and keep getting wildly inconsistent elevation changes. A route that should start at 5,600 feet elevation and end at 3,600 shows an ascent of 64,972 ft and descent of 66,891. Max elevation is 47,038 and min is -17,071. I'm mapping the route in Safari on my Mac. The route is in the Minam Wilderness of Oregon .
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New Route distances and elevations are wonky. Be careful folks.
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It was fairly decent, but now wish I hadn't continued my subscription. I took a know route of 0.9 miles on Island in the Sky portion of Canyonlands National Park (White Rim Overlook, known in that I have hiked it before) and mapped the route with 3 apps:
CalTopo - 0.88 miles, 16 feet gain and 174 feet loss
Altrails - 0.9 miles and 173 feet loss
Gaiagps - 0.87 miles, 294 feet gain and 872 feet loss
The first two apps match each other and my experience hiking there. Gaiagps makes no sense (and you can see it just looking at the Topo lines.
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i am getting the same behavior when creating a route in the adirondacks using the web app. the route shows several elevation spikes of ~49,000'
i am getting this behavior on all the maps / layers that i have tried. this is a well mapped and traveled area, so i suspect that the error is with the gaia software.
given the posts above, this seem to be an issue others have been reporting since fall of 2024. i would have expected a fix by now ...if this persists then i will have to export all my data and move on.
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Been an issue since 2022 never fixed or responded to.
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I struggled with similar behavior in run-tracking applications for years. It seems that the vagaries of phone GPS implementations, coupled with the inherent low accuracy of GPS in the vertical direction, make accurate elevation tracking in apps based solely on GPS all but impossible.
Garmin addressed this by providing an option to correct elevation observations after tracking is complete based on a high-resolution model of the earth. Essentially, the elevation at each observation point is looked up from the latitude & longitude, for which GPS is inherently more accurate than it is for elevation. This happens after the tracking is complete and is implemented on a server, so the elevation gain/loss is only accurate after the fact.
Gaia presumably has access to a high-accuracy elevation model and could implement an option to apply similar corrections. It might be possible for Gaia to do this offline rather than on a server, or perhaps even on-the-fly, if the downloaded maps include that elevation information.
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@ppv123 i understand the Garmin issue fir active tracking, but we are talking about simply creating a route on thier map. The topo lines track correctly but the elevation doesnt. The active tracking is actually a lot closer to the corrext value maybe +/- 10%
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Using the GaiaGPS website to create a route in NC (Pisgah National Forest). I the first 0.6 miles the max elevation is 45,625 ft and the min elevation is -19,319 ft. This apparently is a common issue, but it makes the website worthless for planning hikes.
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