cooker

Thanks - I had planned to do a long bike ride to celebrate the national holiday, but all day they were predicting thundershowers, even though it only rained heavily and briefly around 9-10 am. So I kept waiting, until about 3 pm when I decided to go for it.

Even though it was hot and humid I decided to start my quest to ride the 7 or 8 steepest hills in Toronto this summer. As discussed in another thread they are all pretty tame, mostly rising 20-40 metres in 300-500 meters, except for one that rises 90 m in 1 km. So I did two today, but I had to ride a 35 km loop to get to them.

One of the streets is a crescent, that drops down a slope and comes up again, and from google it looks like the northern section is the tough part, as it ends up at a much higher point than the south end. However as I rode in from the south I came to the drop, and there was a warning to trucks of an 18% grade, so the southern sloped section, although short, is much steeper, rising - or in this case, dropping - 20 m in just over 100 m.

I was really hot, and didn't want to do both ends of the crescent, so I resolved to come back another day for the south end, and rode on to the north end. I have pretty low gearing, so I just slowly spun my way uphill, while above me a young woman walked her bike up while her boyfriend zigzagged. I didn't gain much on them, if at all. Then I had a cooling off coast to another of the planned climbs a few blocks away (it was shorter and steeper than the north crescent, but didn't look anywhere near as steep as the south crescent) and then headed home.

I was very disappointed when I uploaded my Garmin files and found they don't give the elevations very accurately.