Originally Posted by Shut up & ride
Is there an explainable correlation of effort between hiking vs biking a given elevation gain?
Certainly...
You can hike much slower ...in fact... stop and go as much as you want and never fall over. On a bike there's a minimum amount of momentum necessary to prevent falling over. So, you either sustain continually the entire climb or you have to stop and put a foot down.
Other than that, everything else I think of is more or less apples and oranges.