What I did on my holidays - Picos Europas, July-August 2011

What did I do? Took a GPS up a lot of slightly steep bits of Spain. Here's an overview, plus more detailed renderings, elevations and contour maps. All the images are clickable links to larger versions. Photos from the trip are here on Flickr . If anyone is interested in how I did these, details are at the end.

Day One circular route from our hotel in Arenas de Calabres, net ascent 750m, distance 12.9km

Day Two Cares Gorge round-trip, distance about 22km (this gorge is not very kind to GPS, so I've tidied the route up)

Day Three Gorge & Roman path walk from Puente Poncebos to Sotres, net ascent 1000m, distance 12.8 km

Day Four Tielve-Sotres, taking in a summit at one mile and a couple of yards , net ascent 950m, distance 10.5 km

Day Five Drizzly weather ruled out the planned peak, so a 16 km circular route instead, with a net ascent of about 400m, passing through forest. I am pretty sure we spotted the Hound of the Baskervilles on the way, alive & well and delivering subsonic woofs with a Spanish accent.

Here are the elevations for each day. Cares Gorge is probably not very accurate but the other days are fine.

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

And contour maps

Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

All these figures were generated using Sporttracks, an excellent (and free for the basic version) program for analysing data from GPS-based running and cycling devices (anything from Garmin with read support for GPX, TCX or FIT on this list should work with it). I used the Apply Routes plugin to get bigger images for the contour maps, and the 3D rendered images are exports to Google Earth.