Does elevation gain reset each day on a multi-day hike?

The short answer

If the whole trip is one continuous recording — paused at camp each night and resumed each morning — elevation gain keeps summing across every day of it and never resets. The figure at the end of day three is the climb for the entire trek, not just that day. If instead you stop the recording completely each evening and start a fresh one each morning, then yes, each day's gain starts over at zero, because each day is now its own separate route with its own separate total. Nothing about elevation gain resets on its own overnight; it only starts over when a new recording does.

Why elevation gain has no idea what day it is

Elevation gain is built by walking through the recorded points of a track in order and adding up every upward step between one and the next. That running total belongs to a track, not to a date — the same way distance and moving time have no sense of the calendar either. A track that happens to span three days is, as far as that arithmetic is concerned, no different from a very long single-day track: one sequence of points, summed from the first to the last, with the date each point carries playing no part in the calculation.

This is exactly why pausing overnight rather than stopping keeps a multi-day trip as a single route in the first place — nothing about reaching midnight or waking up the next morning is an event a recording listens for, so nothing tells the running total to start over.

What a paused night actually does to the total

Nothing, as long as the recording is genuinely paused rather than left running. Elevation gain only grows from the difference between one recorded point and the next, and a paused stretch adds no points at all, so a night spent camped on a slope contributes no climb to the total. This matters more for elevation than it does for distance: a phone left recording by mistake while stationary barely moves the distance figure, because there is no real movement to log, but it can add a small amount of fake gain from ordinary altitude noise jittering up and down around one spot for hours. Pausing removes that risk along with the wasted battery.

One trip total, or one per day

A single continuous route across the whole trip gives you one elevation profile and one gain figure for the entire trek — the number to reach for if what you actually want to know is how much climbing three days of trail added up to altogether. Stopping and starting a fresh recording each morning gives you the opposite: a separate, self-contained gain figure for each day, which makes it easy to see that day two climbed far more than day one without having to pick through one long file to work it out.

• Want a single trip total? Pause overnight and let one recording run the whole way through.
• Want to compare one day against another? Stop each evening and start again each morning, so each day gets its own number from zero.
• Changed your mind afterward? Separate day files can be joined into one continuous track later, the same way any two GPX tracks can be combined — and a single long file can be split back into day-sized pieces if you recorded it as one trip but want to see it broken up after the fact.

Adding the days up by hand

If you did record each day separately on purpose, getting one trip-wide gain figure afterward just means adding the daily totals together yourself — there is no running total that spans separate recordings automatically, because each one only ever knew about its own points. This is the same manual step as totalling distance or moving time across several hikes: the app can show you each day's figure, but stitching several routes into one combined number for a specific trip is something you do afterward, not something a single recording does on its own.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam keeps recording with the screen off or another app open, and pausing and resuming cost nothing — paused time stays out of moving time and adds no elevation gain, whether the pause is a lunch break or an overnight camp. A multi-day trip kept alive by pausing each night comes back as one route with one distance, one elevation profile and one gain total from trailhead to trailhead; a trip recorded as separate days keeps each day's numbers apart, to compare or add together as you like. TrailCam is free to download.