04 Oct WSC route elevation profile

There have been a lot of requests coming from the Hidden Valley track for the WSC route elevation profile, and I’ve been asked to write a guest post (I graduated from SSCP years ago) to help distribute it. Some time ago I wrote a program to extract elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (raw data) following a CSV route. I used Google Earth to come up with a rough route and export the KML, then ran it through GPSBabel to turn it into an easy-to-parse CSV. This was my “hello world in Go” project.

My program supersamples and does a bilinear interpolation on the route. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing. With any luck the team will collect a better route profile during the race this year. In the mean time, information wants to be free, so happy strategery-ing. Download the results here.