Plan A was to kick off 2025 with the local Wednesday morning group road ride but thought better of it after waking up to pea soup on New Years Day:
So now I'm writing up yesterday's final ride of 2024 instead:
As the Specialized app saw it:
This hill ride in upper Carlsbad had 2 purposes: (1) To explore a mysterious gap in Cannon Road, and (2) to run more RideWithGPS grade calibrations with my new handlebar inclinometer.
The Cannon Gap
Cannon Rd, a major SW-NE artery in Carlsbad, comes to an abrupt halt just NE of College Blvd, then picks up again on the far NE side of a rugged roadless open space bordering Agua Hedionda Creek.
Yellow arrows bracket the "Cannon Gap" in this Google Earth capture. The red arrow marks the water tank mentioned below.
As the crow flies, the gap's 0.8 mi across. A prominent-looking trail crosses it directly. But are bikes allowed, and if so, is my Vado SL with its 38 mm gravel tires up to the task?
Short answers found only by going there: No and no. Per signage at the SW end of the gap trail, most of the gap is occupied by the
Carlsbad Highlands Ecological Reserve, where no bikes of any kind are allowed. And if what I could see of the decomposed granite trail was representative, it was way too steep, rutted, and slippery for the SL anyway.
Route planning tools
This brings me to the route planning/scouting tools currently at my disposal: RideWithGPS, the GPS map in the Specialized app, Google Earth, Google Maps, and various local maps and trail descriptions found online. For starters, none of these resources identified the Cannon Gap as an official ecological reserve. From local experience, that info alone would have put my odds for legal ebike access at slim to none.
Google Maps can be a helpful planning tool in bicycle mode, especially in satellite view, but not this time. It happily plotted an illegal and potentially dangerous bike route through the gap. No word of the bike ban or trail conditions in the route description.
To its credit, RideWithGPS found nothing bikeable (marked green) in the gap with the settings as shown. It was right this time, but I've found bikeable trails around here that it knows nothing about.
Google Earth offers 3D satellite views and a measuring tool that also help at times. The rudimentary GPS map in the Specialized app is OK for figuring out where you are and seeing where you've been on a ride but has little use as a planning tool — especially offroad, where the detail's pretty scant and sometimes misleading.
Might have gotten better advance intel on the Cannon Gap from a service like AllTrails or Strava or a GPS mapping bike computer from Garmin or Wahoo. But I have no experience with these resources and have little interest in paying for them for the infrequent planning I actually do.
Checking RideWithGPS grades
This ride's 2nd objective was to gather more grades with my new handlebar inclinometer for later comparison with the grades that RideWithGPS reports once a ride is finished.
Short answer: Relative to the carefully calibrated inclinometer, RideWithGPS grades are at best 1-3% too low and sometimes much worse. Made sure each time that the slope of the bike's wheelbase was representative of the pitch being measured.
Example: Started up this nearby water tank access road after bailing on crossing the gap. No problem climbing but decided at the top of the first steep pitch that I didn't trust the SL's 38 mm Pathfinder Pro tires to get me back down in one piece.
Consistently measured maximum grades of 18-20% on this pitch in both directions, but the RideWithGPS grade plot (blue line) later showed nothing steeper than +10% headed up and -13% headed down — on the very same stretch of road.
Saw the same pattern on my first inclinometer outing. Plan to collect more data, but results to date support my impression that RideWithGPS grades are consistently too low — or at least lower than a hill's steepest part.
Of course, some of that's to be expected when the steepest part is shorter than the sampling interval. Just trying to learn (a) to eyeball grades on the fly without the inclinometer, and (b) how far off RideWithGPS grades can be.
devoncyclehire.co.uk
I've been wanting to improve my photography and also try videography... So for Xmas I thought I'd gift myself a few presents. The aforementioned DJI Mini 4 Pro drone, a DJI Osmo Mobile 6 gimbal and a couple of new GoPro cameras. Hollywood here I come! 
Snowy day here so no chance of any cycling, Happy New Year everyone!
