You know, it's really easy to write an app for your smartphone to do this. Grabbing your current location with a smartphone is dead simple. My " Navigraphic " app does that, here's the code I use to get the lat/long and the accuracy from any smart phone running a web browser:



As you can see, there's really not much to it. You can save those lat/longs at fixed intervals in a database using a GPX file format. You can use a library of free code called " PouchDB " to store the lat/longs in a database. It also runs in a web browser on your phone.

You can store the entire app on your phone and make it run offline, which will save some battery life. I recently made a " Contacts " app that runs offline and stores data in a web browser's built-in database that you can look at to see how that part works too, and the PouchDB site linked above has great docs and example code, and a very good "Getting Started" tutorial.

I made both those apps to learn how to use those features and released them for free without any restrictions, so you can literally copy and paste most everything you need from those two apps.

To instantly share your data you can use PouchDB with IBM's " Cloudant Service ". It's pretty much free too, and it's very cool. Using this with an online connection you could broadcast your track in pretty much real time to the web, or whenever you wanted to send an update. (I have a version of the Contacts app that does this)

To map your hike I'm pretty sure you can use Google Maps for a free web based solution, and Garmin's BaseCamp is free for both Mac and Windows PCs. There's free mapping software for Linux too.

If you want to give it a crack I'll lend a hand. Perry, you're already professionally working with the real tasks involved, as are many others here, and you know what you want and how it should work. I'm sure you'll be impressed with how easy it is nowadays to make an app like this, and you'd probably find it's actually fun too.

I'm a geek, so I think it could be fun to build this out in the open here, as a forum project for our members to use, learn from, and contribute to as well.