Behind the Scenes Chapter 6 – Elevation Profiles

This is part of a ongoing series that will take you through the steps of publishing our hiking guidebook

 

Elevation profiles are something that we really wanted to include in the guidebook, but we never really got a definitive answer from the publisher. We decided to include them as part of our manuscript submission anyway, hoping that Cicerone would see the value in including them.

I set off to work, using my GPS data to create the profiles using software on my computer. While we couldn’t use these verbatim, they could potentially be a useful reference guide for the in-house design team. The majority of Japanese hiking guidebooks include these mountain cross sections, and they really do provide an invaluable resource in the planning stages of a hike, especially when you learn how to read them. Novice hikers are unaware that a day of 1000+ vertical elevation gain is a ‘big day’ in the mountains, but experienced hikers can get an idea of the up/down involved without having to read any hike descriptions.

In the end, Cicerone agreed to include elevation profiles for each hike and trek, and all of these needed to be annotated. There ended up being a total of 27 elevation profiles for the final draft of the  book (down from the 30 we initially included with the manuscript). The effort was well worth the labor involved, as you will hopefully see when you finally get your hands on the book.