Tackling Kilimanjaro.. it begins here..

It was decided during this long and cold month that next year my dad and I will be making an attempt on Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain and (apparently) the world's highest free standing mountain. I've already managed to collect a number of trekking brochures and guide books on Tanzania and the Kilimanjaro mountain, but what better way than to begin exploring it in a virtual globe?


Looking over Kilimanjaro to the Serengeti plain in Google Earth.


Looking up Kilimanjaro over the Machame trail in NASA's World Wind

Over the next year I'll hopefully be blogging about my preparations for this 'trek-of-a-lifetime' and I'd really apreciate if readers who have been there before left me comments and suggestions on what (and not) to do. I'll compile resources, hopefully plenty of Kili related KML and other Google Earth, Worldwind and other GIS'y related news items. And I'll try my best to take a GPS unit everywhere I go between now on my training preparations to the final step back off the mountain after our achievements (fingers crossed).

Also a quick mention to the Google Earth Blog who gave me my first bit of 'mainstream' blog publicity through the middle of January. Thanks Frank.

Virtual walking in Scotland

A few weeks ago I was pondering to myself why nobody had done anything clever yet in terms of getting many of Scotland's hill walking routes up on the web. There were plenty of amateur sites giving route descriptions and photos, or with snippets of OS maps included, or showing the rough location of the hill the walk focussed on - but none that went the whole hog.

For me the biggest bug bear is always figuring out from where a route starts, which is especially an issue if, like me, you are too tight to buy a walking guide, OS map etc. A motoring map or atlas just doesn't cut it when it comes to finding out where to park, what route to take etc.

OS mapping is now of course fairly freely available via OS's GetaMap, Multimap or various other mapping services - but it doesn't resolve the problem of where routes start, finish and roughly go on your now freely obtained OS printout.

Then Stefan at Ogle Earth posted about an email he received from the author, Paul Webster, of Walk Highlands - an online site of hill walking knowledge, with some great route descriptions (hundreds!), photos and for me, best of all, some awesome KML displaying these routes. I think it's a fantastic tool - my only qualm - I'm based in Edinburgh, and the areas he's left out for now are the ones nearest me! But not too worry!

The site is marvelously simple to navigate too, and packed full of information, from where to stay, what to do with your GPS device, what to make of the weather reports(!) and what else to see and do. There's a forum for general community stuff too. It's a little bit Isle of Skye focussed, but I'm sure it will expand if the demand is there. And if he manages to sell a few Amazon books out of it in the process (through the built-in Amazon shop/affiliate shceme), then fair enough for paying for the hosting costs.

But for me, the best bit is the KML. Below is a sample of one of my favourite routes on Royal Deeside - Lochnagar - a route I've taken a few times myself (see route description and photos). The routes are coloured according to their grade, from easy to hard, there is the odd photo included plus a few other bits of information including a 'boggyness' scale.


Walkhighlands.co.uk KML sample

So no more excuses about not making it to the hills more often. This weekend I'm going. Honest!

Ski resorts in virtual globes and maps

Got ski fever today.. and since I can't afford or have time to jet off in search of snow, I thought I'd do some (web) surfing instead. Below, a bunch of links to some ski resources in Europe, mainly the Alps.

I started looking mainly at the KML out there. One of my favourites is one of the Swiss Alps resort of Zermatt posted by GE Earth Community member TommyAfrika. It shows the location of the various resorts around the region, many of the trails and pistes and best of all, it's in glorious high resolution imagery. Click the thumbnail below for a better view.



Then there's a great KML by SkiBumRick showing resorts in
the Tyrolean Alps. Not so many trails, but certainly a great list of resorts over in Austria.

Eastern Europe is catered for by KML's for both Slovakia and the Czech republic by GEC member maco.

Further afield, in Argentina, Gerardo64 GEC member, has done a trail map overlay of the Cerro Catedral ski centre, Bariloche. It's a nice little KML of a part of the world I haven't done much exploring in. His post is also nicely annotated with photos of the resort, and winter fun!


In terms of a single KML for a huge list of resorts all over the globe, you could do worse than GEC member 1will's placemarks and links to snow reports. Not the most descriptive of placemarks, but there are an awful lot of them!

Finally, the GE blog has some interesting posts on mapping your ski trails in Google Earth using Geovisualiser. His KML is really interesting, and is colourised either by altitude or speed. So take your GPS with you next time you go skiing!


There is of course much more ski related KML out there, and this is just a selection from a few hours I've spent browsing. Sadly, quite a few of the older bigger KML's from a few years ago now have broken links and so have not been included. Couldn't find one for Scotland though..so maybe I should start work on that myself!

Sedna & Zahara update

It's been a while since I had time to update on the 'progress' of our GPS tagged animals. Zahara, our Loggerhead turtle has entered the Gulf of Aden, and is almost directly south of the Yemen city of Al Mukalla. Note the staggering statistic of over 8000km travelled in 6 months on the map below. Not bad for a baby turtle.


There has however been no update on Sedna, our shearwater since boxing day. Most likely this is due to a failing of the gps tracker, though I'll email the folks at Seaturtle.org to see if they have any further information. Most likely cause is probably the GPS tracker sinking, which means it's most probably come off in some kind of way.

Tracking animals in google earth..

Very Spatial links to a few sites that use satellites to track animals. Nothing new perhaps, but in the case of the loggerhead turtle, they are now using googlemaps to track these creatures potentially offering a wealth of interesting information to would be adopters. Another interesting site WhaleNet has a list of marine animals it keeps track off using satellite beacons. Most of this data isn't rendered 'live', but they certainly have interesting maps and other data.

It makes me wonder - we've been doing this for a long time, and there must be a whole host of data available. I think a lot of people would be seriously interested in tracking specific species or individual animals within google maps. It perhaps poses a bit of a moral question of using wild animals for 'recreation', but besides the obvious attachment of a sensor (which it can be argued is firstly for scientific purposes) , there is little impact on the creature's life.

I might choose an animal for this blog ..and we'll keep track of it. More soon.

arcExplorer & backseat gaming

Before we move onto the big news of the past few days, let me first talk about an interesting article that I read about on slashgeo. BackSeat Playground is a project sponsored by Microsoft and the Ordnance Survey, that plans to utilise GPS and ICE (in car entertainment), in the form of a video game, that relates a narrative on the basis of geographic location. While the 'game' appears relatively simple currently, it will be interesting to see how this can evolve. Into 3-d worlds through which you move as in real-time, affected by real weather and location? Interaction with other BSP users?

ESRI's arcGIS Explorer was fairly highly anticipated by the world. Not only is it a much needed rival to the google-earth's and world-wind's of today - but also an interesting change in direction for ESRI. Some of the functionality already present is really nice, with fairly intuitive interface that ESRI users will be familiar with. James Fee in his spatially adjusted blog, offers extensive review of the new product, together with the news that there are some new nice globes available for the newly releasedarcGIS-online.

I'll do more of a review of arcExplorer when I manage to use it a bit more. Haven't done much with it just now besides look at the base datasets. Currently it feels very similiar to GoogleEarth - though much much slower(almost certainly due to me using their dataservers, not locally kept copies).

I'm rather interested to see what developer tools will be made available, and what other data formats it is likely to support - outside of the esri standards.