Pacific Crest Trail GPS Tracks for Garmin inReach

For my upcoming PCT through hike attempt, I bought a Garmin inReach Explorer GPS and satellite messenger. I intend to use the device mainly as safety precaution: my family and friends can see my progress and I can trigger a SOS from the device if something would go wrong.

The second use of the Garmin inReach is as a GPS navigation device. The popular Halfmile PCT maps can be downloaded in the .gpx format suitable for uploading to the inReach. The only issue is that for some reason there is a 500 tracking point limit per track when uploading to the Garmin webpage to sync to the device. By default the Halfmile maps contain few long tracks with significantly more than 500 tracking points per track. The webpage only offers down sampling the tracks to 500 points. That does however lead to very low resolution tracks that might not be very useful. To get around this issue I modified a script from tinuzz that originally only allows simpler operations on .gpx files to allow splitting up tracks with more than 500 points into multiple tracks of 500 tracking points each. The script can be found on my github in a fork of the original script.

For convenience you can also directly download the processed Halfmile tracks for the whole PCT from here. Those .gpx files can then just be uploaded to the Garmin inReach webpage and synced via the desktop or the smart phone application.