Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
I do not look at elevation totals at all.
If possible, I look at elevation profiles so I can see what the bigger hills look like. And even the small ones can be worse if steep, if possible I like to see what the percent grades are.....
My point is that in this case, just using different base maps in the same software will give you different data. I might look at height of individual hills, but I do not look for totals.
This. If my app accumulates and sums the elevation gain of every pebble my tire climbs, my total elevation gain after 50 miles could be enormous. If I was looking in Google Maps for example, I would look at the one day's route alone and I would examine the profile of the elevation changes over meaningful distances. The data could be off with respect to shorter distances, but it seems less probable that it would be off by hundreds of feet over a 5 or 10 mile climb.