Mix Canyon Road

Mix Canyon
Approaching Mt Vaca

We're getting close to the end game in the 2010 Low-Key Hillclimbs and the mind naturally turns to the 2011 schedule. And there's one climb which I've wanted to visit ever since it was first suggested to me three years ago.

That's Mix Canyon Road out of Vacaville. From Vacaville, you follow Pleasants Valley Road to the north until Mix goes off to the left.


View Larger Map


The usual response is it's sort of far afield. Sure, from San Jose it's 91 miles and it's 86 from Palo Alto but from San Francisco, where I live, it's closer than three of the climbs on the 2010 schedule. I'm not too worried about the distance. It's worth a bit of travel for a very special climb.

After the turn the road climbs gradually but it gets steeper the further you go. Approaching the summit is a will-cracking 15% sustained, which means sections at 20% with "recovery" at around 10%. The combination of altitude gained, the duration of the steep portion, and the location of the steep segment within the overall climb is a combination which is really hard to resist.


The profile tells a big story, but I also like grade histograms. My favorite representation is in total climb at or above each particular grade after applying a smoothing function representing the general ability of a rider to "power up" short steep sections. Here's how Mix Canyon fares in this analysis, compared to Old La Honda road, the unit reference for cycling climbs:



There's some serious action there in the ≥ 15% range. Mix gives up nothing to Welch Creek or Bohlman-Norton up here. And Mix delivers its maximum grades in a bigger chunk, with more climbing already in the legs.

And the numbers back this up. The climb's rating is 245. That compares to 235 for Alba and 231 for Bohlman-Norton. Mix is rated higher than any climb Low-Key has done.

Anyway, it's definitely on my to-do list, one way or another.

Comments

bobonker said…
I did this ride today. The first 3.5 miles didn't seem that bad which I knew meant that the last mile would be a sufferfest. It certainly was! Jeeeezus, that last mile is insane. Good torturous fun...highly recommended. Gonna go back soon and try to go faster.
July 10, 2011 at 5:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Marin Avenue (Berkeley)

Image
On Saturday, I got an email from Tim telling letting me know that Murphy's Spring Classics was going to start up Marin Ave. I'd missed that. Murphy announces his courses the day before, and indeed it was already well into the night before when the course announcement went out. I'd skipped over the details, jumping straight to middle and end games. Marin? I laughed at the irony, because not long before when he'd told me he was choosing to repeat the Nifty Twn Fifty which we'd done together last year versus selecting Murphy Mack's Stage Mullett two-day, I responded I didn't think I had it in me to ride Marin Ave two years in succession. Well, so much for that. I was committed, so I went downstairs to swap my 11-26 cassette for my Recon 12-27. The name is easily overlooked: "Marin Ave" fails to strike the same impression as, for example, "Redwood Gulch" or "China Grade". But among those in the know, Marin Ave is infamous i
Read more

hummingbird feeder physics

Image
I couldn't figure out how the hummingbird feeder worked. Why didn't it overflow? Forces need to balance, of course. Neglecting surface tension, there liquid level is higher in the inner reservoir than in the feeding chamber, so there must be a corresponding pressure difference. Suppose the pressure in the inner chamber were zero. Then the column height difference would need to be atmospheric pressure / (density of liquid × gravity). But this is over 9 meters! Obviously the height difference is only approximately 1% of this. So the pressure difference inside versus outside is only approximately 1%. The inside is only slightly below atmosphere. So air is getting in. How? Does it diffuse through the liquid? If this were the dominant mechanism, it wouldn't take long for the pressure inside to go from 99% to 99.3%, for example, which should be plenty to push the column of liquid down in the inside chamber and thus push liquid out through the holes. It would over
Read more

Gallium Pro geometry

Image
On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc
Read more