Diablo Ride - Sat. Dec. 8

[aka_kim]

11% average??? I would fall off my bike crying like a baby if that were true. I think 5-6% is more accurate ...

[SadieKate]

Diablo ain't tall enough for an 11% average grade and a lot of us have ridden it enough times with good altimeters to know.

You'd have to climb 5,808 ft over 10 miles for that. Do the math. Here, I'll make it easy.

[jobob]

I thought 11% seemed like a bit much as well. That's Sierra Road/Welch Creek territory.

With my CicloSport computer I can download the % gradient over very short intervals of a climb.

So, I pulled up the data from one of the times I climbed the entire mountain up the north side, and dumped the data into this spredsheet.

I color-coded the gradient values so that < 6 % is white, 6% to 8% is yellow, > 8% to 10% is orange and > 10% is red. Apart from the last bit to the summit, there are not very many stretches over 10%. The brief steep sections are mainly switchbacks, and the gradient there depends in part on what line you take going around.

My numbers worked out to about 6% average gradient from the North Gate to the Junction, and 7% average gradient from the Junction to the summit.

[maillotpois]

Nancy - I didn't mean percentage gradient - I meant cumulative feet of climbing. (These guys know more about percentage and that's not really relevant for what I need for ride planning.)

on the cumulative feet, topo will give me 20,000 feet where a ride only has 11,000, for example.

[Bike Goddess]

You can tell I don't know much about gradients! 11% when I think about it seems a bit high since the last pitch is (I understand) 17%. So my thinking is the program I saw at REI the other day didn't calculate the straight areas and the slight inclines very well. It pretty much skipped that part which, as I see now, would make the climb much less steep.

Tomorrow we'll see what the average is for the S Side to the Junction.

[jobob]

I got 5% average for the south side, from the Hole in the Wall to the Junction

[SadieKate]

Way easier! Why even bother?

Let's do repeats up Pilot Butt instead.

[maillotpois]

I was thinking about this more.

Alpe d'Huez is 11% average, I believe. (They do their roads differently, so the switchbacks are dead flat and the part in between is scary steep, but I digress.) Anyway, when I rode that back in 2003, I remember thinking it was the hardest ride I had ever done, after the 2002 Death Ride.

So 11% is pretty scary steep average.