what is traveled elevation?

Question

Is Traveled Elevation from my home elevation or sea level?

Edit: Thank you for the answers, but they don't answer my question.  If I take my average elevation times my number of finds, I get over 34,000,000 feet.  But that would assume I start at sea level and go to the cache and then back to sea level, which is not accurate.  But let's say I go to Colorado Springs, about 6,000 feet and then one day drive up to Pikes Peak and get 6 caches at 14,000 feet.  My elevation traveled that day is about 8,000 feet.  Let's say I go the next day and get one more cache on Pikes Peak, again,  traveling about 8,000 feet.  Project GC says my "traveled elevation" is about 1,800,000 feet.  Does that statistic assume I started at my home elevation, about 80 feet (Orange County, CA), on each day?  Or does it use the elevation of my previous cache find?  Or is there some other algorithm that is used?

Answer 1

What is the context? Is it a question in a cache?

Travelled elevation may come up in challenges - e.g. "How far was your travelled elevation in one day"? So if you start at a cache at sea level and on the same day end up with one up a mountain over 2000m high, then your travelled elevation for that day would be over 2000m for that day.

Another interesting fact is that 'travelled elevation' doesn't have to start at sea level as many Fenland caches in the UK are below sea level. Also, for example, if you were in Israel and started at one of the Dead Sea caches which are at about -400 and then travelled to Jerusalem which is about 750-800m, then you could potentially have a travelled elevation of nearly 1200m.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Interesting question. I was curious so I took each elevation range and multiplied it by the number of caches found in that range. Using the high end of the range I get 367500 m travelled and on the low end I get 286250 m travelled if I assume each one references zero. Project-GC tells me the average elevation of my finds is 315 m (1030 * 315 is 324450 m) and my travelled elevation is 125265 m. Based on this I would assume that it is reporting the change in elevation between each find. This makes senses as I live near sea level and like to go find caches on mountains and I have gained up to 2200 m of elevation between finds in one day. Your number may seem out of line if caches were logged in the incorrect order or challenge caches were signed but then logged later when the requirements were met.

Answer 3

Elevation is sea level