距離125mで高度上昇26m、21％の坂を頑張りました。

I went out for a long bike in the mountains of northern Kyoto on Saturday, and after 120km (75mi) of tough ups and pleasant downs with friends (that I'll write about separately: here and here), I made an attempt at a hill so steep that its name on Strava is "Nasty".

It's so steep that they have a mirror over the road, pointing down, so that folks coming from below can see whether the road is clear up over the lip.

The hill rises about 26m over a distance of 125m (85' over 410'), which puts the overall steepness [...]

I made my second cycling run up Mt. Otowa (音羽山) on Wednesday, the first having been two days prior in the gloomy late afternoon just before a typhoon came through. Wednesday's was the first afternoon after the mild typhoon passed, so I expected the air to be really clear (like this and this), so I lugged my Sigma "Bigma" 50mm~500mm zoom all the way up there, along with the 2×TC to give me a 1,000mm lens.

It was so not worth it... it was the most hazy I'd seen it in ages.

The only things that were sort of clearly [...]

In the screenshot of Google Earth above, you can see the route that I rode my bicycle last Wednesday... the little bit of green coming in from the right is a downhill section of road, followed by the long red uphill section through the tiered rice paddies of the village, then up the mountain on an old road no longer open to traffic.

I'd ridden 55km (34mi) to get to that point, and would end up riding 72km (44mi) farther before I got home, but ever since my first "real" ride in February, I've not been so interested in how [...]