Santiam Alpine Club – GPS tracks of Oregon peaks

The Santiam Alpine Club has a very useful web page listing GPS routes for many popular Oregon peaks.  (A “route” in GPS-speak is a collection of individual waypoints that together lead you to your destination.)  These routes are easily downloaded to your GPS for your next climb, and/or viewed in Google Earth to help you plan your route before you go.

Each route is helpfully saved in four different file formats, allowing compatible use with almost any type of GPS receiver.

To view a route in Google Earth, follow these instructions.  (If you do not have Google Earth on your computer, you need to download this program first.)
1) Go to the link below in your web browser. 
2) Click the peak you want to map.
3) Right click on the link for “.GPX” file format, then select, “Save Link As,” “Save Target As,” or the appropriate option for your browser.  Save the file to your own hard drive, maybe in a new folder called something like “Oregon climbing GPS routes”
4) Launch Google Earth.
5)  Click the Tools—> GPS—> Import tab.  Check the button for Import from File, and check the box for Waypoints.  Click Import.
6) Select the .gpx file you just saved onto your hard drive, and click Open.
7) Google Earth should now auto-magically load the .gpx file you selected, draw in the waypoints as flags, and fly to the location.  Now, use your mouse buttons to fly around your virtual mountain and see the waypoint flags in place.  Very cool, no?

Link:  http://www.santiamalpineclub.org/mountain/climbing/gps/routes/

Here is a screen grab image of a .gpx file of the standard south side route on Mt. Jefferson displayed in Google Earth.  (It looks a lot better in Google Earth, when you can see it on your entire screen.)