I am finally processing the JMT section hike in my head. Just realized that Strava had created a flyby of the hike and it is fairly impressive. Reliving climbing Forester pass again is wonderful. A few folks asked me how to recreate this. Here are my steps.
Apple watch battery life
I used Apple Watch 10 to record my hikes. I carry a Garmin Inreach Mini2 as well and I tracked the hike through that as well, but with 10 minute intervals, the map is not great. I prefer the Apple Watch. The trick with the Apple Watch is to manage its battery life.
I turn on Airplane mode in my phone and watch
I turn on theater mode on the watch. That turns off the display (big battery drain)
I upgraded to an Apple Watch 10 for better battery life
When the battery life goes below 80%, you can request Apple to change the battery for a fee, they don’t advertise this, but they do
With this setup, I can track a hike for up to 11-12 hours. Each night, I recharge the apple watch completely. Apple watch requires 360mA to recharge fully. For a 6 day hike, a 10,000 mAh battery pack will recharge the apple watch 5 times in less than 20% of its capacity
At the end of each day, I end my hike with Apple watch. Each day is a separate section.
Strava
I then sync all my daily hikes to strava. It shows up as individual days on Strava.
In Strava webpage (not in the app), go to the activity detail. Click on the … and you wil see a way to “Export GPX” file. The GPX file is a XML formatted text file.
Now you will have each day as a separate GPX file. In my case, my apple watch ended my hike a few times (thank you AllTrails watch app), so I had about 12 files.
Now you can go to any online GPX merging app such as https://gotoes.org/strava/Combine_GPX_TCX_FIT_Files.php and merge the individual files. GoToes actually integrates with Strava and can pull your Strava activities as well. Note that most apps will limit you to 5 GPX files at a time, so be patient. It took me 3 attempts (files 1-5, 6-10 and then a final merge)
Upload the merged full hike back to Strava. Note that Strava identifies a hike as unique by the starting time. So if you have day 1 already in Strava, it will ignore the merged hike, so I delete day 1 from Strava before I do this.
Flyby generation
Flyby generation is enabled in Strava paid versions. If you don’t want to buy it, then use Relive: https://www.relive.com/, this app has a free trial and also a cheaper version. I usually get it for a month or two each year and cancel. They all can take the merged GPX file and generate a flyby.
Lastly, I ran the flyby in my phone and use the iPhone screen recording (turn off notifications!) and recorded the screen.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
