Over the years, I've seen various overviews of the San Gorgonio Wilderness trail system, including a table on the back of the wilderness permit, a schematic map ("San Gorgonio Wilderness Trail Distances"), and a brief table of miles and elevation gain ("Want to go to the top of San G?"). The schematic map used to be on the SGWA web site, but now seems to have disappeared, and the only copy I was able to find recently by googling was a low-res image on someone's Pinterest page, with the mileages too small to be legible. I also felt that the design of the schematic was a little too "busy," and it broke down the mileages into such short segments that it took a lot of arithmetic to figure out actual distances from A to B. So I decided to make my own version of the schematic, with a table of stats, which is here: https://github.com/bcrowell/san-g/blob/master/san-g.pdf . The document and drawing are in editable formats and are under an open-source license, so if you want to mess with it and improve it, you can. I also made a spreadsheet with a more detailed version of the same stats: https://github.com/bcrowell/san-g/blob/ ... routes.csv . Any comments or constructive criticism would be very welcome.
Rather than putting the traditional elevation gain figures in the table, I put in a statistic that I call the climb factor, or CF, which in my opinion is more meaningful. For example, if you do Vivian Creek out and back to the summit of San G, the climb factor is 25%, which means that the amount of energy your body expends is 25% more than if you had walked the same distance on the flats. A lot of people find these figures counterintuitively low, but I think that's because we focus psychologically on the climb rather than on the experience of the easy glide back down. For anyone who's interested in calculating a CF from a GPS track, you can try my software through a web interface here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/kcals/ .
If you look at the spreadsheet, you can see that the mileages I measured (using mapmyrun.com) are generally in pretty good agreement with the other sources of information I had, although usually a little shorter. (It's actually pretty tricky to get good absolute precision on this sort of thing -- you'd think it would be easy in the era of GPS-enabled cell phones, but that doesn't work to the kind of precision you'd imagine. I don't know what technique the forest service or SGWA used for estimating their distances.) The one huge discrepancy is on the mileage for Forsee. I would be interested in any suggestions for tracking down the source of this disagreement. By tracing over the trail as mapped on mapmyrun.com, I get 24.0 miles, whereas the other tables I've seen put it at over 30 miles! I wonder if the route has changed, or if the tracing on mapmyrun (which probably comes from google maps) is wrong. There is some ambiguity about where the trail actually starts, since it touches the road in two places.