Dive into the map

On the 22nd of March, Pavlek Levpist wrote alpine history. He is the first mountaineer to Zipflbob down Mount Everest. According to news coverage by the outdooractive Magazin (German), Pavlek and his brother managed to climb up to the base of Hillary Step, where they had to abort their summit attempt due to severe weather conditions.

However, this was only the start of their remarkable adventure. From the base of Hillary Step, Pavlek used his Zipflbob to slide down the icy 40 degree south face on the Lirpa 1 route. They succeeded in following their strategy to ascent and descent in a single push.

“Speed is your life insurance up there” said Pavlek in an interview after their trip. They did not use bottled oxygen on their attempt. “Bottled oxygen is like doping - it’s just not our style. We like the idea of knocking-off the bastards by fair means. Many people suggested that we should use the plastic material body of our Zipflbob and fill it with oxygen - using the Zipf as a breathing tube - but this is just really not our idea of moutaineering.”

More images from the expedition can be found on the outdooractive news page and a video is also announced to be available on outdooractive in the next few days.

Asked about future plans, Pavlek said that he wanted to cross the European Alps on a special Zipflbob Transalp route. “Many people do a Transalp by foot, with skies or with a mountainbike, but I think that the most exciting experience will be to do this with a Zipflbob - as far as I know, no one has done this before and I like to explore new ways of doing things.”

News media are still waiting for feedback and opinions about this remarkable achievment from Reinhold Messner, Hans Kammerlander, Ueli Steck and the Huber Buam. All of them can be considered pioneers and legends in mountain climbing and each of them introduced a new distinct style and spirit. Now, Pavlek Levpist will join this heroic list.

Trails is an iPhone application that lets you import, export and record GPS tracks. Recording works fine, but chews up battery pretty quickly. Feels a bit odd to look at the green Google Maps cartography on the display when everything around you is covered in snow. I should probably file a feature request for real-time map colour coding with Google - so some 20% project mastermind can do a kick-off, dig into real time weather and snow forecast data, figure out an algorithm and then use some magical filter to give the map a more realistic look - a cold snowy one that would be here. Or how about OpenPiste Map? Hold on, I just saw I can now style my own map. But then, how do I get it displayed on the iPhone afterwards?

Anyone planning a mountain bike transalp challenge in the European Alps can now use a transalp route planner based on Google Maps.

While there are already a lot of outdoor route planning sites in general, the MTB-Transalp site we launched at outdooractive last week, is specifically aimed at people who want to plan a mountain bike transalp trip. Based on an underlying 14.000 km track network of selected transalp trails, users can put together an individual route. The site is in German language only, but you can watch a Transalp Route Planning Video on our related blog post, to get an idea about how it works.

Route Planning Interface

Anyone, who has used the point-click-drag-n-drop interface from Google Maps to plan a trip by car, will appreciate the same basic functionality, which is also available for the Transalp Route Planner. Since Google Maps is still ill-suited for decent planning in offroad areas, we have added a nice outdoor map with special cartography for Germany and a standard topographic map for Austria, which will both give you more details as a basis for planning in the offroad areas.

An elevation profile of the route shows you information about the expected quality of the track surface and highlights the areas where you will have to walk your bike.

Once you have put together your route, you can export a GPS (GPX) track of your individual transalp tour to take with you on the trip. There are also export options for PDF that will give you a print-out map if you don’t like GPS devices or you just want to back up your digital devices with a printed map. If you want to explore your transalp route in 3D, you can do this by switching to the 3D-View - this requires the Google Earth Plugin to be installed - or loading the GPS track into Google Earth. Note, that this may not work for all routes at this stage yet, as we are still resolving some issues to optimise performance for long tracks with many route points.

Selected Transalp Routes

If you don’t like to put together an individual route you can also select from predefined Transalp Routes. Here, our editorial team has put together some very cool routes with detailed descriptions, photographs, GPS track, elevation profile and all sorts of other information about interesting places along the routes.

As an alternative to the outdooractive Transalp Route Planner, you can also try the following site, which also lets you plan a transalp trip by putting together predefined route sections.

So start planning, get fit and then explore and discover your personal Transalp challenge!

Snow Canyoning was huge before global warming started…

Recently, Google announced an extension to its API to pull Map Maker Tiles - something, that was already predicted more than a year ago. Then, shortly after, the news about recent developments related to Google Map Maker - the new directions feature for MapMaker. Also reading about how TomTom is using GPS traits from its customers to improve the quality of their map database, Google’s Street View data coverage and about the new Google Android My Tracks application, that can record tracks from outdoor enthusiasts and then maybe do something not-evil with them… and finally…Blink!

I just can’t help but wonder how long it will take, until Google will have built up its own Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) - the GGeodata - a Google SDI that will join the data pools already available from government mapping agencies, the commercial geodata providers like Tele Atlas or Navteq and the OpenStreetMap project. It looks like Google can already build its own base map for many parts of the world. I always wondered why Google does not use OpenStreetMap data to fill in the gaps in their maps, but licence issues are probably a good explanation why that is not happening.

I could imagine that Your Tracks will soon contribute to an offroad map database. In a similar way, all sorts of GPS tracking data, for instance generated via Latitude could be used to enhance the quantity and quality of the huge data pool that may be fed into the super-analysis machine.

I wonder if someone will figure out how to automatically create a routing enabled network from spatio-temporal tracking data - would be much more convinient than waiting for the crowd to do their volunteering job by digitising and defining attributes. What if you could use geospatial lifeline data (pdf!) and all kinds of other automatically generated tracking data and work out the segments and nodes by aggregating all the data and applying some magic analysis recipe to it. Speed of movement at certain times by a certain amount of people… many things could be inferred…

But how do you gather all the required data if you are not Google or a mobile network operator? Maybe you found OpenGeoSpatialLifelines - but that sounds too complicated for a project title - so how about we just call it OpenLifelines - or even better OpenTraces, and make it a place where people can anonymously share their spatio-temporal location data. Then we would only need the magic recipe - So anyone volunteering to have a go at the algorighm?

First I thought moles, but as we got closer, I knew we finally discovered the secret breeding ground for Christmas Trees. I’ve never really tried geocaching, but I reckon fresh snow geocaches would be heaps of fun - except - when you want to hide a snow-cache you’d need to do some serious planning ahead - if you don’t want to give it away to easily.

 “Whiteout is a weather condition in which visibility and contrast are severely reduced by snow and diffuse lighting from overcast clouds.” (from Wikipedia)

What a great day to explore untrodden ground and discover the Void. Chances of getting lost? Pretty good, if you are not familar with the area. Reference points? None! - Hmm, well… your partner. If you’re an expert with the altimeter and the compass - or if you have a GPS device, you can greatly increase your chances to find your way back - after snow and wind have taken care of your tracks. Otherwise, good luck and get ready for the bivvy!