Orizaba - New DGPS Altitude 2016

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Damien Gildea

 
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Orizaba - New DGPS Altitude 2016

by Damien Gildea » Tue Mar 29, 2016 4:47 am

I summited Orizaba on 7th March 2016, the day before the crevasse incident mentioned in the post below. I broke my own trail, as snow the previous evening had covered any existing tracks. The route from my GPS is below, overlaid onto Google Earth imagery. I saw only two very narrow crevasses, barely big enough to get a boot in.

On the summit I ran a Trimble 5700 DGPS unit - the same one I used in my Antarctic GPS summit surveying. I also ran a Garmin eTrex30 continuous from the hut to the summit and sat them side by side on the summit. I also sat my Suunto Vector watch at the same location.

After post-processing the data with the free AUSPOS http://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/positioning-navigation/geodesy/auspos system, the result is that Pico Orizaba is 5634.5m (18,481 ft)
Piedra Grande hut is 4247.6m (13,932 ft)

You can see that the Suunto was way off, as expected, and the Garmin was around 10m too high. Had it been running less time, and for less time on the summit, I would expect it would be even more off, around 30m too high.
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Damien Gildea

 
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Re: Orizaba - New DGPS Altitude 2016

by Damien Gildea » Tue Mar 29, 2016 6:03 am

Here are some more photos, to give an idea of conditions at the time. It was unusually snowy for March, but under the snow were constant small penitentes and occasional rocks, that made for awkward and slow movement.
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