Online website to track A.T. section hikes and overall progress?

Question

It's always been a dream to thru-hike the A.T. but life is looking like I will not be able to tackle that until retirement. The doesn't mean that I cannot do sections of it as a day/weekend/week here or there becomes available.

Are there any online tools or websites that will keep track of the overall progress that one has made on the trail?

Lets say I do a section of the trail from Harper's Ferry (I'm located in MD) to South Mountain State Park early in 2015. Then do a Maine section later that summer. And then lets say I do more day trips here and there depending on where I'm going to be for that weekend. If I'm looking to do another larger piece of the trail in early 2016, it'd be nice to have one central location available to keep everything in place and organized.

Besides doing it yourself manually (which isn't that hard), are there any available tools to make tracking pieces of the trail easier?

I've seen CalTopo or HillMap from this question but they are not specific to hiking trails and are more generic (which will still be useful but not what I'm thinking of).

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EDIT: I do not own a GPS (besides the one in my smartphone) and am not looking for immediate tracking of my hike.

I'm looking for an ability to track the different sections of a hike (I say where I started and ended for a specific hike on the AT) and keep them available in a simple way.

If you take a look at pickatrail, they list 212 sections of the trail at roughly ~10 mile pieces. If i wanted to start at a specific point on the trail, I'd probably start at one of these pieces but wouldn't be able to guarantee that I'd finish the whole piece in one day hike.

I'm looking to eventually finish the AT over numerous years.

Answer 1

I don't know about online website, but you can use a handheld GPS like Etrex to keep track of your progress. And since this stores GPS in a common format, you can import this data into another program that will render it in Google Maps which you can then display on your web browser.

Answer 2

There are different web services which combine maps (usually downloadable) with GPS and the possibility either to permanently communicate and save your progress (update-rates usually can be chosen manually) or to let someone know your position at your discretion. The permanent update requires connection to a network and may not be available everywhere on the trail, plus it eats up quite a lot of battery (less than 10hrs on my Samsung with endomondo). Currently, I like viewranger best, as you can get the finest of map material for download and you can save the maps on the external memory card of your smartphone. I have a Samsung Galaxy x-cover 2 (or GT-S7710) which works well for me, even though the mainboard has only 1G memory. I have a 32G SD card for the maps, which is plenty. Now for the services:

www.viewranger.com

www.endomondo.com

www.oruxmaps.com

hope this helps!

Answer 3

I'm looking for the exact same thing. I'm using Guthook's AT Guide for Android to figure out bite size pieces of the trail and if it let you mark sections as complete, it'd be absolutely perfect. I'll prolly stick with that and then a printed map with highlighter for that pretty and satisfying map view...