Best practices for hiking route planning

[jbensman]

I'm also a little bummed as I wanted to try and accomplish pretty much the same things as you have posted. There was a thread on a similar topic in another forum: http://forums.gpsreview.net/viewtopic.php?t=23222   I'll restate one more possibility for you to consider. Many of the hikes that I was looking for had 'tracks' already posted somewhere online. Lots of different hiking sites contain these gpx or gdb files that you can download to your handheld and follow while you're hiking. Last weekend I hiked the Knob Mountain/Jeremy's run trail in the Shenandoah national Park. There were at least a couple of postings where folks had saved their track and shared it online. These tracks can viewed over the topo's available on this site and you're good to go.

Got a track?  If I remember correctly, the NPS data I have for shenodoh sucks.

jbensman, I think this is what you were asking me?

Here's one example of what I meant:
http://www.hikingupward.com/SNP/JeremysRun/
The links to the gps files can be found in the yellow shaded area near the top of the page. The *.gdb file appeared to work fine today (I did get a Save File message box) but the *.gpx file caused an error.
Here's another link for the same hike:
http://www.midatlantichikes.com/id82.html
gps file link is below the topo pictured

No that is not what I was looking for.  It was a route, not a track.  I was wondering if you had your track from the hike.  There is a huge difference between a route with a few points and a track with hundreds of points.