Serious adventurer Jeffrey Poznanovic likes a new site called MyOutdoors.net.
“Map your outdoor activities. Journal your progress. Attach Photos. Share it all with friends and family.”
The map-based interface is not all that intuitive. Using a mash-up of Google Maps is touchy. Most people make mistakes using that AJAX technology.
But if you take the time to figure out how it works, MyOutdoors has some very cool features including: mileage distances, elevation profile, GPS waypoints, linked photos, and more that I do not understand.
No doubt about it, sites like this are the future of hiking. We’ll be linked by satellite on the trail, uploading video and photo directly to MyOutdoors in real time. (The rescue helicopter will have exact coordinates and visuals by which to confirm location!)
They need to simplify the interface. Or, at minimum, put up a friendly video tutorial to show me how to best use the site.
Want to try it out yourself? Check the Wind River Backpacking entry in Wyoming.
screenshot
Wind River Backpacking – MyOutdoors.net
For more information – Cirque of the Towers – besthike.com
besthike.com 
Thanks for the mention! We’ve done a lot of work to try to simplify the mapping interface (we’re actually on our second version of it), but we realize that there are still problems. Part of the issues come from allowing users to insert points between existing waypoints, drag points, and to delete waypoints, so we needed separate editing modes for those. It would be a good idea to add a short tutorial on all the features though.
We absolutely welcome any suggestions that our users have as well. Just drop us an email at myoutdoors@myoutdoors.net (hopefully we’ll get a form for this up soon). The site is pretty new and we’ve tried to work out the kinks but we know there are still bugs. It’s just a side project for us but we’re very serious about improving the site as much as we can.
Thanks again and send us your feedback everyone!
Dale & Brian
Excellent guys.
I’ve subscribed to your blog:
http://myoutdoors.blogspot.com/
… and will be following the evolution of MyOutdoors.net closely.
Our site lists the “best hikes in the world” and, of course, we want to link to places that have the GPS data.
A map driven mash-up of trip reports, photos, video and waypoints is the future, obviously.
But the visual I want is something like what you see on the golf channel! Floating over the fairways.
All the best!
Rick McCharles
editor besthike.com
Actually, we thought the same thing! My brother recently added KML downloads of all of our journal entries so that you can import them into Google Earth. As far as I know there are no web interfaces that provide something like this (yet), but Google’s standalone application can give you a really good feel for the actual elevation and distance of the hike. Here’s the blog post we had about it with an example: http://myoutdoors.blogspot.com/2006/10/kml-downloads.html
Dale