Google Earth Adds Hiking Trails Layer

By Rocky Thompson on April 18th, 2007

A new feature in Google Earth shows hundreds of hiking and biking trails across the US, and it allows users to add and rate new trails. You can send the trail info to your cell phone and plot the hike if you’re running a GPS-enabled phone. To see the new hiking trails courtesy of Trimble Outdoors and Backpacker Magazine, just turn on Google Earth and look under the Featured Content in the Layers pane. With all this technology, pretty soon I won’t even have to leave my computer to go hiking.

via Modern Hiker

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Google Earth Adds Hiking Trails Layer”

1. Backcountry.com: The Goat » Blog Archive » Google Workout Plan April 18th, 2007 at 8:41 pm

   [...] Here’s another killer Google hack made for outdoorsy people. Just plug your start and finish into the Gmaps Pedometer and it calculates distance, change in elevation, and calories burned. The downside is that you need to bring your laptop with you on the hike to see how much ground you’ve covered; alternatively, I guess you could just wait until you get home to check out your hike.  [...]

2. beecee April 20th, 2007 at 10:40 am

   For a custom version of the Hiking trails, the Suunto X9i GPS watch tracks you as you ski, hike etc, and can overlay the track on Google earth when you get home. The watch also give all the standard GPS data: distance, speed, elevation profile, etc. This is a free software upgrade from Suunto that links to Google earth. No need to take your laptop hiking now! Whew!

3. Joe Mobile April 20th, 2007 at 11:03 am

   Beecee, why on earth would you take your laptop with you? Try out the new Trimble layer and you’ll see that you can send a hike to your GPS-enabled phone. Trimble even makes tracking software for a bunch of Sprint and Nextel phones. No need to take your Garmin with you!

4. Backcountry.com: The Goat » Blog Archive » Free Online Hiking Maps May 10th, 2007 at 12:17 pm

   [...] The website ProTrails.com added several more free hiking maps to their list of national parks walks. They only have maps for hikes in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, and South Dakota, so people in North Dakota are still screwed—they don’t even get discounts at Mount Rushmore. I like ProTrails because they have a lot of info on the hikes, which is something the new Google Earth Hiking Maps feature can’t deliver. [...]