How This Works

Most weeks it is the same trail before sunrise, and that repetition is the point: the same shoreline, photographed and measured through the year, says more than one visit to fifty places.

Each entry starts with two files: the GPS track exported from the watch and the photo taken at the top. A script turns them into the page. Distance is the summed haversine distance between GPS points. Elevation gain depends on what the watch recorded: barometric tracks go through a five-point median filter and count only climbs over three meters; GPS-derived tracks, which jump several meters between seconds, are smoothed over a minute and count only climbs over five. Every entry says which method it used. Moving time drops any stretch slower than one kilometer per hour, which is standing still.

Sunrise and civil dawn are computed for the trail's sunrise spot on that date. Conditions at sunrise come from Open-Meteo's historical archive (ERA5 and ECMWF analysis, licensed CC BY 4.0), which separates low, middle and high cloud, the split that decides whether a sunrise lights up. For recent mornings the nearest National Weather Service station observation is recorded alongside it, because an airport ceilometer is an instrument and a model is a model.

Photo metadata is read once for the camera fields shown on the page, then stripped from the published file. Where a photo carries no GPS position it is placed by matching its timestamp to the track. Nothing on a page is typed in by hand except the note, and if a value was not measured it is left out rather than estimated.

Comparisons such as "visit 23" or "sunrise 14 minutes later than a month ago" are not stored anywhere. They are recomputed from the whole log every time the site builds, so adding an old hike re-ranks everything automatically.

The log sits alongside the trail reviews and the gallery. The site is static, sets no tracking cookies and runs no analytics. See the privacy page and the affiliate disclosure.