Anyone have a link to a calorie calculator for trekking?

I have used the cc calculator and there is only mountain climbing or cross country hiking or walking. I would like to know how many calories are burned an hour based on time and altitude and distance. Every week I go treaking and would like to have a better idea of what I am burning. A second question, when we started, it took us 4 hours to make the trip, now after a few weeks, we are doing the same trip in 3 hours. We are now running and working allot harder, burning more energy to get it done, and I think overall it is a much better workout, burning more calories. My question is if I use 4 hours, I get x amount of calories, if I use 3 hours, I get a better workout, but the calculator will say I burned less calories. How would you count the energy expended?

i would buy a heart rate monitor

Yeah, uphill trekking is one of those things where the calorie burn varies wildly with the steepness of the slope you're going up, the speed you're doing it at, and the load you're carrying. So calculators like this will generally have trouble with giving you an accurate assesment of your burn - mapmyhike.com has some tools you can look into, but the accuracy suffers under the same constraint as CC

Hello and thank you both. Melkor, that is a good link, but the results are as you said about the same as cc. If I pick up a heart monitor, is there a table that you can use to understand the calories burned? and of course, I even have a problem with using a monitor. My heart rate is way below the norm. It is not because I am in any great shape, just genetic I guess. My resting heart rate is somewhere in the 40's and I am 53. It should be in the 60-80 range. If I am going all out on the stairs, after 20 min I may break 100 bpm. Given this history, would a heart rate moniter still be able to give me a good idea of calories burned?

thanks again.

 If you get one that does a VoMax test for you like the Polar HRM's, or use the Rockport walk test to get a reasonable estimate for your VoMax - that is, a measure of how much oxygen your body supplies per heart beat, and thus a measure of how much energy your body is expending at a given pulse rate - you should get a reasonably accurate measurement of your calorie expenditure.

 When it's set up properly the heart rate monitor will give you a direct readout of an approximately correct calorie burn - unless you've got a very basic one that only measures your pulse rate at any given moment.

Thanks,

Took  your advice and picked up a Polar F4. I have posted on the polar site, but I think I still have the problem of my slow heart rate and getting an accurate burn count. My resting heart rate is 30 bpm and when I am climbing like a madman at 147 steps a min at the highest difficulty setting on the machine, I am only pushing 100 bpm. The polar thinks for my age that is a low heart rate for my age and body and suggest a higher target rate, if go any faster, or push any harder, I will fly off the machine lol.. any advice.

My heart rate monitor tried to kill me as well when I first got it, before I had all the settings adjusted to account for my current fitness level ;)

 Well, my resting heart rate is a little higher than yours - 38 - but I had to do that Rockport walk test and manually adjust the VoMax setting before it would agree that I was burning any calories at all outside of sprint training.

  I thought the Polars came with an OwnZone fitness test that adjusted this for you automatically though? If yours doesn't, you may have to do that Rockport walk test thingy to get a reasonably accurate figure (standard deviation is 2.8% when done correctly) for your VoMax and then manually enter that plus your highest and lowest heart rate to get a better picture.

 Huh - that's about what I went through with my cheapo one; I recommended Polar 'cause I thought you didn't have to do it all by hand with theirs. My bad, in that case - if you have to do all that work anyway you might as well have gotten the cheaper brand.

thanks I will see if I can figure out how to reset the info. I just came back from the gym, the stairmaster says I burned 650 cal in 30 min. There was a huge puddle of water on the ground from all the sweating, my hrm says I burned 190 cal... something is not right...