Elevation Profiles

Title: Elevation Profiles

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

The informant was Ben Ferguson. Ben is from Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth College, and he graduated in 2015. He is currently working at the Mount Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. He spent a lot of time in the White Mountains as a child because his parents and grandparents went to Dartmouth, so they would come to New Hampshire and Vermont to hike and ski. He always wanted to hike the Appalachian trail after learning about the meaning of the white blazes as a child. He hiked the trail in the Spring and Summer of 2014.

Contextual Data:

Social Context: The elevation profiles are used by hikers for navigation. Elevation profiles may be consulted at any point while on the trail by any hiker to track their progress and to make sure that they’re still on track. The only way

Cultural Context: There are two primary books that people use to do navigation. These books are the Appalachian Trail Conservancy Guidebook and there’s Awol’s AT Guide. These are essentially the sources of truth for people hiking the Appalachian trail when it comes to navigation. They both use elevation profiles to explain the navigation instead of actual geographical maps or directions.

Item:

The elevation profiles simply show the change in elevation between landmarks. That way, it gives you a good sense of the intensity of the hike, and where good places to stop are since it points out shelters and places to get water along these elevation profiles. The elevation profiles also give a good sense of which shelter one can camp at that night given the distances between shelters and the intensity of that day’s hikes.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

“There are two guidebooks that people carry. There’s the Appalachian Trail Conservancy guidebook, and then there’s this book called Awol’s AT Guide which is probably more common, because this guy travels the trail every year and just gets all of the information he can about mileages and springs, and he goes to each of the trail towns and interviews people in the hostels to get all of the information that a thru-hiker would need including mileages, where springs are, where campsites are and shelters. The guide book is page after page of a black line that goes up and down that is an elevation profile, so when you’re looking at it at the beginning of the day you can see that the first five miles will go up and then it goes down again. Other than that guide book, nobody really carries maps.”

Informant’s Comments:

Collector’s Comments:

Collector’s Name: Andrew Ogren

Tags/Keywords:

Dartmouth Folklore Archive