That got me curious. So I looked around and found that the way to calculate gradient is ft in climb divided by ft in distance. Is that right? The toughest part of the climb is 174 ft (53 meters) over 1805 ft (550 meters) in distance. So the gradient is about 9.64%. Not sure what that means. But I know it's a steep hill -- it's steep even for driving

My original intent of the post is to see if using a heavier touring bike with lower gear would make sense. I don't want to be pushing the bike with 20 lbs of stuff on the rack up a steep hill