Finding the gradient of a hill without gps

guy.spartacus

anyone know of any online facility that allows you to see gradients of hills?

Got beat 3/4 of the way up one on a new route yesterday and it was steep as all hell

lifeform

The convoluted method I use is bike route toaster, map the hill in question, then click on the summary to see the start and finish height, find a gradient calculator online, and input distance and climb in metres.

guy.spartacus

thanks...trying to do that and get the whole hill is a bit of an ar$e!

seems the ascent was 57m in 300m

guy.spartacus

seems that's 19%

I will beat it next time

optimisticbiker

So 19% or 1 in 5... steep enough, but short.. just under two minutes effort at 6mph or 5min walking!

guy.spartacus

yeah, not used to climbing and haven't recieved my spd shoes and pedals yet!

lifeform

Although strictly speaking it's not that accurate - google maps / route toaster gives you the measurement by road distance, which would be less if you were pedalling on the flat. So using that method we're measuring the wrong bit of the theoretical triangle.

Nevertheless, 19% is a bit of a climb. My nemesis is a 15% climb over 1km... I suspect it doesn't sound a great deal to a lot on here, but I'll beat the thing this year and in my defence, it's 17% for the first 350m, then levels off a bit for the remaining 650km.

I've only been trying it for the last fortnight on my new road bike - missing the MTBs granny gear already!

tom22

download google earth,
find the hill,
click 'add path' in the top bar
left click points along the road (right click to undo a point)
then save it,
go to 'my places' in the left column,
right click on the path you just created and select view elevation profile,
then u can hoover your mouse over the profile and an arrow points to the corresponding point on the route you made.

(be carefull to follow the road exactly otherwise you can get crazy gradients if the path strays off the road and up a small embankment)

it will give you the gradient at any point along the route!!!

rolf_f

lifeform wrote:

Although strictly speaking it's not that accurate - google maps / route toaster gives you the measurement by road distance, which would be less if you were pedalling on the flat. So using that method we're measuring the wrong bit of the theoretical triangle.

You have the info to work it out properly but, in truth, it isn't that innaccurate anyway. The difference in lengths won't make that big a difference to the gradient calculation.

rolf_f

lifeform wrote:

Although strictly speaking it's not that accurate - google maps / route toaster gives you the measurement by road distance, which would be less if you were pedalling on the flat. So using that method we're measuring the wrong bit of the theoretical triangle.

You have the info to work it out properly but, in truth, it isn't that innaccurate anyway. The difference in lengths won't make that big a difference to the gradient calculation.

flegghighsmells

It's not terribly accurate but try:

http://www.mapmyride.com/create

Click point to point from the base of the climb to the top. Once you've done that, there's an "Elevation" button at the bottom of the screen.

The Ors

tom22 wrote:

download google earth,
find the hill,
click 'add path' in the top bar
left click points along the road (right click to undo a point)
then save it,
go to 'my places' in the left column,
right click on the path you just created and select view elevation profile,
then u can hoover your mouse over the profile and an arrow points to the corresponding point on the route you made.

(be carefull to follow the road exactly otherwise you can get crazy gradients if the path strays off the road and up a small embankment)

it will give you the gradient at any point along the route!!!

Brilliant!

Thanks for that.