Climbing the Mountain at the Pecos River Encampment
Each year at the PRE, one or two of the morning recreation sessions offers the opportunity to climb the mountain. This is a pretty good workout, but it's surprising the range of ages that participate from kids as young as 4 up thru some of us who are feeling the years - ha.
During 2007 I braved my way up the hill helping my 7 year old son and hauling both the digital camera and several bottles of water to drink at the top of the climb. I had set the GPS to set a point about every 0.01 miles in order to capture the path up and back down again with some pretty good accuracy. One thing about hand-held GPS is that it relies on satellites closer to the horizon to actually help get its location fix, the ones directly overhead don't tend to give as good a lock. As a result, the altitude that it states is not very stable, and you often have to let your GPS sit on the ground for several minutes in order for it to "get happy" with the altitude reading. On the other hand, getting a latitude and longitude fix is a lot more accurate, on the order of a 7' circle on good days.
So this year, I found out some very surprising facts from the GPS information. For one thing, although it looks like you are extremely high overlooking the camp grounds, in fact you are only about 500 ft in elevation higher. The perspective is provided by the fact that you are actually 0.55 miles west and 500 feet higher. Here's a chart of the elevation, as my GPS, a Garmin 72, recorded 65 points along the hike.
Altitude in feet above sea level, versus the point numbers taken from start (1) to finish (65) during the climb. You can pick out the two level plateaus and the peak where we stop and take a breather. This is also where we sing some songs, hear a devotional message, take some time for prayer and then start the descent down to camp.
I used a Google map overlay to let you see where the GPS took its readings along the path. If you've never been to the camp before, you can see it's a pretty good hike, totalling about 1.2 miles round-trip a good percentage of it is climbing but it's followed by a restful walk downward.
pre_mountain_climb.gpx
Here's a text version of the GPS points that I took off the trail.
This is normally called a "GPX" file, which you can load into most GPS programs and devices.
Notice the kid in the upper left in the gray shirt, who was caught in mid-air jumping off a rock.
Well, not quite the Garmin 72, but close enough.