I'd agree on DMD Hamilton and diablo are the only mountains - but it that just a nomenclature issue? It is Mt. Hamilton and mt. Diablo after all, so maybe it's just what we're used to.

I love the rollers, even the long ones. And I love our sustained climbs. I'm not sure how well I'd do in the eastern part with the steeper shorter stuff. It would be hard to get in a rhythm with that.

And from what I've seen and ridden of the Alps/Pyrenees, they're more like our Sierra roads with reasonable to high gradients; however, they pitch you up between the switchback instead of in the switchback like we do here, so you can often get more climbing overall. It was weird to have the actual switchback be the flat part where you can recover because it's so often not the case here.

Back to the original issue - and I'm not sure if anyone noted this yet, but weather can affect the barometric corrections. I spent a morning climbing the geysers and I and the other 5 people with Garmins all showed we were steadily descending. It was VERY odd, but the weather was changing dramatically from rainy/cold to warm.