Witless Bay Line, Early Autumn

The weather here is still holding good. I got an unanticipated 100 km ride in yesterday - Bay Bulls, Witless Bay Line, Holyrood, Conception Bay Highway, Topsail Road, home. It was sunny throughout, with ideal temperatures. There was a bit of a headwind on the last third of the Witless Bay Line, but by then I needed the challenge. The views over the barrens were taking my mind off the effort (and everything else) anyway - the little deep blue ponds receeding into the distance, each one poised upon and punctuating it's own discrete terrace - a study in horizontals. I never cross this section without feeling absolutely euphoric at some point! It's a great section to ride alone. But it's 28 kilometers of emptiness before you hit Holyrood, so fill up your bottle in Bay Bulls.

Here's the route map:

Bike route 1854126 - powered by Bikemap 

Avalon Biker goes to Ontario - Part Two

Here's another ride I did while on vacation. Until I did this I had no idea what the Trent-Severn Waterway was (and they say mainlanders are ignorant of Newfoundland!). The Trent River near Glen Ross was beautiful. Downtown Sterling had a good coffee shop. The loop is about 30 kilometers of flat riding on pavement.

Bike route 1846663 - powered by Bikemap 

Avalon Biker goes to Ontario - Part One

We've just been on vacation in Niagara Falls for three weeks. Took our bikes with us. Yes, fine weather to ride in!! Here's a particularly nice ride I did on September 21st:

Bike route 1846639 - powered by Bikemap 

This was a beautiful morning on the Niagara Escarpment, with several red-tailed hawks flying over the vinyards, deer peeking from the woods along shaded country lanes - very nice. My destination was Café Domestique in Dundas, where the owner has one of Steve Bauer's 1988 yellow jerseys on display (not to mention excellent coffee and food). Getting through Hamilton caused a few navigation problems but I arrived at the prearranged time, and Deborah drove me back to The Falls. A wonderful day! About 90 km and pretty flat. Here's me, as close to Le Maillot Jaune as I'm ever going to get! Where's the podium girls??!

Hardest Climbs on the Avalon

Avalon Climbs Ranked by Category and Length

During a recent club outing a couple of the younger lads were discussing a ride they`d just completed on the southwest Avalon. They started at Colinet, went down the North Harbour road, up the Cape Shore to Placentia, then across the dirt section through The Cataracts to Colinet. Now, Saint Bride`s - Placentia is only 30 kilometers but nortoriously hilly, with perhaps the steepest pitches anywhere on the Avalon. I took three hours to do it north to south one afternoon, on a hybrid with 26 inch wheels and two full rear panniers. It's incredibly beautiful down there when you can see through the fog (doesn`t Rex Murphy write somewhere that Gooseberry Cove is the closest thing to heaven he's ever seen?).

The boys were getting gradients of 14% from their onboard GPS units, and their discussion got me wondering about what might be the most difficult climb on the Avalon. I started plotting all the long hills I could think of using the Map My Ride interface. The data are tabulated above. Categories were assigned by the MMR software itself. My criteria were not rigourous; I simply eyeballed the longest possible section with the highest average gradient for each climb; I did ignore anything less than a kilometer however, because finding the steepest pitch shorter than that would be too exhausting to do by hand.

Is there any application where the raw numbers are quite as misleading as they are for bicycle climbs? From South Side Road up Shea Heights is a lot of work, but I've never found it as hard as coming up the other side from Maddox Cove, though the latter ascent is given the easier Cat 4 rating here. Despite these shortcomings, I believe the table does give a good overview of climbing on the Avalon.