measure slopes/plan trips on google maps

[ryanb]

So this winter i got frustrated with the available online mapping tools and wrote a google maps mash up to help me plan backcountry trips. It gives you:

 

* Side by side, coordinated topo and satellite views.

* Basic slope estimates at a point.

* Overland distance and elevation gain/loss for trips (change the mode to path).

* Point forecast at weather.gov

 

It is still somewhat buggy but I have been finding it very useful and I just got around to posting somewhere publicly accessible (google app engine for the geeks). Check it out and let me know if you have any feedback or feature requests...I'm doing this in my spare time with zero budget but I'll try and make improvements as I can:

 

http://www.hillmap.com/

 

I realize this tool is probably mostly useful to skiers but I figure you could use it to figure out just how painful the darington approach is going to be this year and how low angle the rock will be once you get there ...(actually it doesn't work well for cliffs since the horizontal change can be less then the resolution of the data and the size of the measuring circle ... though you can change the circle size in the settings to get it a bit better).