What I did on my holidays, 2012 edition, part 1

This year was another Exodus trip, to the Carpathian mountains in Romania. It was a bit different from last year, with more emphasis on seeing the wildlife and culture of the area, and less hard-core walking. The last day, in terms of distance, ascent, and grade, was up there with anything the Picos tour had to offer; it was technically easier as there were no sections requiring scrambling and fewer areas where there was a steep fall possible from the side of the path. I'll post details of the other days later, and photos on Flickr, but for now here are route and elevation images for that last day. Click on the images for larger versions.

3D rendering:

Elevation plot:

We definitely did this the easy way round - the descent is almost twice as steep on average than the climb was! Notice the very, very steep section at about 8km - that was taking the shortest route from a shepherds' camp up to the main path, climbing 70m in about 200m. So, steeper than 1 in 3. I think we were all quite happy that the path was a bit less steep after that point (and led to a mountain hut with a supply of cold Ursus beer!)

Contour map with terrain shading:

(Technical details, if you're interested: the GPS trace is from a Garmin 310xt running/cycling watch. I used SportTracks 3 to make the terrain and elevation plots, and to edit some errors in the gorge section (gorges are very difficult for GPS receivers because of the poor sky view and reflections from the sides; when equipment that can also use GLONASS and Galileo satellites becomes available, this should improve), and Google Earth for the 3D rendering of a .gpx file exported from SportTracks)