Tuesday: Prospect Mtn (and a century)
Second day off from work. John, Anthony and I planned a climb up Prospect Mountain in Lake George (elevation 2034′, with about 1600′ of climbing).
I got up around 7:30 after Anthony called me and got dressed for the ride. No oatmeal in the house. Phooey. I had to put gas in the car anyway, so off to the Stewart’s down the road for rations and gas. Grabbed a couple of PowerBars for the ride while I was there–got home and realized I forgot to get the gas. So back out I go for gas.
Once Anthony arrive and suited up we set out to meet John on route on West River Road. This saved us a little time. The ride out to the base of Prospect took about 30 miles and we took it pretty easy. North on West River Road, north on Fort Edward Road, cross the bridge and into the glorious metropolis of Glens Falls. After a couple zigs and zags, it was onto the bike path. Now they have a very nice bike path that I’d recommend to anyone looking for smooth pavement, interesting terrain, and the occasional bridge over traffic. 
Kinda makes you feel important that they actually built a bridge over the traffic–not like the second class citizen walkers and cyclists seem to forever relegated. One of the interesting sights is of the water tube rides at Water Slide World. (A note about their website… they don’t have their own domain name, and their design looks like it was done around 1995.) 
The only hesitation I had about the path was that it was strewn with the leaves of autumn. Beautiful perhaps, but it forced us to be more careful and slow down a tad for fear of sliding on the (sometimes wet) leaves.
We paused at the Stewart’s next to the entrance, had a snack and refilled the bottles. This was my first time climbing Prospect and aside from more seatpost problems it went quite well. 
Since the road is closed part of the year (starting two days ago) we have to jump the gates. The gates are large metal constructions with bike-sized holes in them. Very convenient. The second gate was just a modest two-foot high jobby we could almost bunny-hop without even getting off.
Here is some history for Prospect Mountain. And here are a couple of pics.
The descent was awesome if a bit bone-chilling. Letting the sweat cool on you for several minutes while taking in the sights is inevitable. We were commenting afterwards that all the curves on the descent were gentle enough to not require much/if any braking.
We swung by Fort William Henry on the way back to add a little history to our tour. In Glens Falls, Davidson Bros. called to us and we had some delicious sandwiches to fill some mountain-sized hungers. My sandwich had coleslaw in it… I’m a sucker for sandwiches with coleslaw as an ingredient. (Another note about another website, their website is barely better than Water Slide Worlds’. At least they have their own domain name.)
Back on the road, John asked me how far Anthony and I were going. I said we’d probably peel off on Peters Road, the same way we came. (I swear, Anthony, I was originally thinking this!) But then thought, well, we could see you (John) all the way home and get some more miles in since neither A. nor I had time committments. One thing led to another and we ended up rounding out the ride to an even 100. Sorry, Anthony, if I dragged you further than you had planned for the day. Hope you didn’t mind. Anthony ended up with 249 miles for the 4-day weekend, and I garnered 190 (not sure what John had).
Elevation profile
Statistics
Distance: 100 miles
Elevation gained: 5161′ (which doesn’t seem right… John, what did your Garmin get?)
Uphill time: 2:24
Downhill time: 1:42
Flat time: 3:28
Uphill distance: 20.45 miles
Downhill distance: 25.66
Flat distance: 52.68
Uphill grade: 5.3%
Avg/max heart rate: 148/182 (although I frequently forgot to pause it while on breaks, so it’s lower than it should be)
Number of e-mails from work since Friday 5pm (as of Wednesday 8am): 242
Difficulty index: 28.88
Effort index: 121.05
What’s this difficulty and effort index thingy? Basically the guy who wrote the TopoFusion software that I’m getting these numbers from came up with arbitrary formulas as a way of comparing hiking/cycling GPS tracks to each other.
Photos courtesy of my crapcam.
1 Comment to Tuesday: Prospect Mtn (and a century)
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146 for me, which I would have considered a bad 3 day weekend 6 months ago, but am quite pleased with at this time. Thanks for the link, I was going to ask what that diffculty thingy was.
BTW I re-upped with BikeJournal. You’re right, even if I am not using much of the site, I am using it and the designer does do it all out of his basement on his own dime.
The Garmin had 4320, the Lance-o-matic 3480, but the sampling was slow after we came off the mountain.
http://webmhcc.org/rn/modules.php?name=gallery2&g2_itemId=6700