How to total your elevation gain for the year

The short answer

Export your recording history as a CSV file, open it in a spreadsheet, and sum the elevation gain column the same way you would sum distance. If the export mixes hiking with running or cycling, filter the activity column first so the total only covers the hikes you mean. That is the entire mechanical process, and it is identical to totaling distance for the year — the only thing that changes is which column you add up.

Why elevation gain behaves differently once you start adding it up

A single hike's elevation gain is not read off a summit sign — it is built by comparing the altitude of each recorded point to the one before it and summing every increase, ignoring every decrease. GPS altitude is noisier than GPS position, because the satellites used to work out height sit less favorably in the sky than the ones used to work out location. That noise wobbles a reading up and down by a small amount even when the real elevation is not changing, and because the running total only ever counts the upward half of each comparison, the wobble does not average out to zero over a hike — it very slightly inflates the total, hike after hike.

Distance does not have the same problem. GPS position is measured more precisely than GPS altitude, and small positional noise mostly cancels out over the length of a route rather than accumulating in one direction. So a year of distance totals is adding up numbers that are each fairly stable, while a year of elevation totals is adding up numbers that each carry a small, one-directional lean. Neither total is wrong. The elevation one is just built from a slightly less steady ingredient, and that shows up more the more hikes you fold into a single yearly sum.

What this means in practice, and what it does not mean

It does not mean the yearly elevation figure should be thrown out or distrusted. A year's worth of real climbing — stairs of switchbacks, a summer of ridge walks — dwarfs the small per-hike noise by a wide margin, the same way a single hike's real elevation gain dwarfs it. What it does mean is that a yearly elevation total is better read as a solid ballpark than as a figure worth comparing down to the last few dozen meters, and that it is not the number to reach for if you want to settle an argument about which of two very similar years involved more climbing.

It also means the yearly total will drift a little if you re-export it after the app recalculates old routes, or if you compare it against a different app's export of the same history — not because anything was lost, but because elevation gain was always an estimate, and different estimates of the same noisy input do not land on identical numbers. The guide on why two apps disagree about elevation gain for a single hike covers the same mechanism at a smaller scale.

Getting the total, and slicing it usefully

Summing the column

A single SUM formula over the elevation gain column, in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, adds every row in the file whether it holds twenty hikes or two hundred. There is no need to separate anything out first for a raw yearly figure.

Filtering by activity or by month

A filter on the activity column narrows the sum to hiking alone if the same history contains rides or runs. A filter on the date column narrows it to a season or a single month, using the same spreadsheet and the same total column.

Sorting to find the days that actually did the climbing

Sorting the rows by elevation gain instead of adding them up surfaces the handful of hikes that produced most of the year's climbing — usually a small number of long or steep days rather than something spread evenly across every outing. That shape is often more useful to notice than the single total is on its own.

Things that trip people up

• Expecting a yearly elevation total to be as exact as a yearly distance total — the two are built from different quality of raw data, and elevation was always the noisier of the two, on a single hike and across a year of them.
• Being surprised that re-exporting the same year gives a slightly different total than before — that is the same estimate being recalculated, not data going missing.
• Trying to settle which of two years had more real climbing when the totals are close enough that the gap could be noise rather than an actual difference in how much climbing happened.
• Adding up numbers by eye from a list of individual hikes instead of exporting the summary — the error rate from manual addition across dozens of entries is far higher than the noise in any single elevation figure.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam can export the whole route history as a single CSV file, with elevation gain calculated per hike alongside distance, duration and pace, and each row carrying the activity type so a hiking-only total is a filter away. The same history is available as GPX 1.1 if the route shapes themselves are ever needed instead of the summary numbers. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.