Fellow Virtual Travelers and Historians,

On our recent trip to China, we had some old reliable equipment with us, as well as some new gadgets. Dennis outfitted himself with a GPS unit that talked to an App on his iPod. This allowed us to 'see' where we were on the iPod map and was especially useful in cities. Anita got herself an older model of the Garmin Fenix GPS watch, to attempt to record some of our treks. It worked and we have data on a total of 29 different tracks. We were gone for 26 days, so we gave the watch a good workout!

To introduce you to the Garmin Fenix, let's talk about Huashan. That's the huge granite mountain that contains the plank walk (which we were still not able to complete, due to high winds this time):

http://www.wherecoolthingshappen.com/huashan-crazy-plank-walk/

We sent you an update from Huashan on 10/21/16. That day we recorded our West and South Peak treks with the new Garmin Fenix GPS watch. From the taxi ride from the hotel to the Huashan shuttle, to the cable car, to the hiking on the mountain, and then back to the hotel, attached is a screenshot of our trek that day (HuashanGPSTrack).

Glancing at the data, it looks like we hiked over 2 miles on the mountain that day, covering an area of over 26,000 square feet. We'll do more in-depth research to find out if that's 2 miles on the flat, or taking into account that most of the hike was up and down (paths and steps). Eventually we'll build adventures on Garmin Connect and map our treks to GoogleMaps.

For now, here's a bird's eye view of the entirety of Hua Mountain:

Here's a zoom in to the area we hiked: