Esja Kistufell-Gunnlaugsskarð
Author
Trail stats
- Distance
- 4.69 mi
- Elevation gain
- 2,533 ft
- Technical difficulty
- Moderate
- Elevation loss
- 2,562 ft
- Max elevation
- 2,789 ft
- TrailRank
- 19
- Min elevation
- 243 ft
- Trail type
- Loop
- Time
- 4 hours 48 minutes
- Coordinates
- 624
- Uploaded
- January 4, 2008
- Recorded
- May 2007
near Álafoss, IS.15 (Ísland)
Viewed 7627 times, downloaded 279 times
Itinerary description
One of the components of the Esja massif is Kistufell, a chest-like formation (thus the name). A friend and I ascended the SW corner of the south face of Kistufell, then descended via the Gunnlaugsskarð pass. A nice hike - for pictures click the title above.
The poor quality of the georeferencing of some of Google's high res imagery is clearly visible here - near the top we followed a chute which can be easily distinguished - but our track is falsely shown well west of it. Similarly our route along the western edge of the top plateu is shown hanging in thin air. One almost misses the old Landsat coverage ....
The poor quality of the georeferencing of some of Google's high res imagery is clearly visible here - near the top we followed a chute which can be easily distinguished - but our track is falsely shown well west of it. Similarly our route along the western edge of the top plateu is shown hanging in thin air. One almost misses the old Landsat coverage ....
Waypoints
Waypoint
2,582 ft
Cairn 1
10-MAY-07 19:43:58 - 10-MAY-07 19:43:58
Waypoint
2,674 ft
Cairn 2
10-MAY-07 20:12:56 - 10-MAY-07 20:12:56
Waypoint
2,789 ft
Cairn 3
10-MAY-07 20:21:51 - 10-MAY-07 20:21:51
Waypoint
253 ft
Car
10-MAY-07 17:17:29 - 10-MAY-07 17:17:29
Waypoint
2,277 ft
Chute
10-MAY-07 19:05:41 - 10-MAY-07 19:05:41
Waypoint
2,628 ft
Cliff Edge
10-MAY-07 19:39:03 - 10-MAY-07 19:39:03
Comments (2)
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Looks like the image isn't orthorectified - points are more accurate at low altitutes.
Agreed with joi - Google imagery is not completely orthorectified, for whatever reason. They piece together their earth layer from thousands of satellite and aerial images (to avoid cloud cover and to get higher resolutions in particular areas), taken from all distances and angles. You need to know the exact location of the camera, and you need to know detailed elevation of the surface being photographed, in order to correctly distort the photo to drape properly. There are errors in both of these, and sometimes some hand tweaking of image placement and distortion might be needed to get things to align, but that would be labor intensive. In cities, they seem to make a real effort to get streets and landmarks to line up well. In the outdoors, there are fewer landmarks and being offset is seen as being less critical than having streets "mismatch".
There's not much Wikiloc can do about it.