Our transition from Michigan to Colorado is almost complete. Two weeks from now, the whole of scaq will be in Colorado together. Together again. I am so happy to be reaching this point. There will be some lingering financial issues related to the pending sale of the home in Michigan, perhaps cause for severe stress, but at least our family will be together again! And in the West again.
For the first day of my last weekend alone in Colorado, I headed out to the Jefferson County Open Space Park, Alderfer/Three Sisters for a bit of mountain biking -- of course. The forecast high for Denver was 93 degrees F, so I wanted to get out early. But I also value my sleep, so I found a good balance and left the house a little before 7 a.m. On the trail by 8 a.m., I was not the first rider out, but there weren't many in front of me. And I passed most of them on the first big climb. :)
I used my Google Android app, My Tracks, to log my route again. Here's a link to a Google map created from my GPS log: Click Here!
And here's something really cool. Recall that in the previous post I had used R to create a figure showing my elevation and speed based on the data output from the My Tracks log. Recall also that I wished I could have used distance rather than elapsed time on the x-axis, but the My Tracks data output only included latitude and longitude for each point; it did not include a distance calculation. Here's the analogous figure for today's ride, with elapsed time on the x-axis. Also, I realized that R has treated the time data as categorical (as a 'factor') rather than numeric, so the x-axis is not uniform with respect to time.
So this afternoon, I decided it would be fun and useful to see if I could calculate the distance based on the coordinate data. This may occasionally come in handy for me at work, and it was easier than I'd expected. In the R package called Fossil, there is a function that uses the haversine formula to calculate distance between two points on a big sphere. I was sort of thinking I was going to have to write my own function, which would have been fun, but Matthew Vavrek had already done it for me! All I had to do was write a few lines of code to calculate the distance between each point (there were almost 3000 of them), convert the values from kilometers to feet, and make the list cumulative. It was remarkably simple, and the distance values match my bike computer to 0.1 miles! Of course, the two graphs don't really look much different.
Alright, enough talk about numbers!
The ride was nice. The first few miles made for quite a climb, but the trail was not particularly challenging in a rock-crawling technical sense, aside from a few tricky Front Range switchbacks. And oh, but that first big descent was really nice! My braking fingers got pretty tired and my rotors must have been roasting, but I'm pretty sure my Nickel was grinning from grip to grip.
The picture below was taken roughly half-way through the big climb. This park is a little further into the mountains that some trails I've written about here, and the elevation is a little higher, so it had a real Rocky Mountains feel to it.
Ya' gotta like rocks!
There were some nice views out across the town of Evergreen. The Nickel asked if I would be kind enough to take its picture. Tourists!
If you look back at my GPS log, and zoom on the map in the satellite view with 3D terrain, you'll see the rock outcrops that comprise the Three Sisters. Very cool. I took the picture below on the way up towards the Three Sisters from the east. I had actually intended to come up from the west, over the saddle between two of the sisters, and down toward the east, but I ended up on the wrong trail at one point and didn't figure it out in time. Once I did figure it out, I had come too far east, but I didn't want to miss the most challenging section of trail going over that saddle, so I went up from the east and then back down the way I had come. There were some sections on the Three Sisters Trail that I could not ascend, but I rode down most of them.
At one of those scenic stops along a rock outcrop, I came across the little guy below having a snack. Perhaps I should say he came across me. This was about the time that I was beginning to suspect I'd taken a wrong turn, so I was quietly sitting on rock with my big map out trying to determine where I was and where I should go next. I don't carry a 500mm lens when I'm mountain biking -- or at any other time -- so a little enhanced scenic was the best I could do. I was also shaking from the intensity of the climb to reach this point!
So, it was fun. A pleasant, moderately easy, 12-mile ride, with a few short, really challenging segments. We can add this park to the list that we'll be able to do with Cindy and the kids. Maybe not that first big climb, at least not immediately, but many other trails in the park are easy to intermediate in difficulty and could be just about right for their recently transplanted legs and lungs.
I'm still thinking about trying to convert the elapsed time to seconds, and getting R to recognize it as numeric, and then recreating the plot. I'm addicted to R.
No comments:
Post a Comment