Snoqualmie Falls Hike Analysis

Today was perhaps my 32nd hike at Snoqualmie Falls. I've adopted this trail as my daily hike routine. Today I brought my new Garmin Oregon 400t GPS with me and recorded the track. Fortunately there is a website (although not that good) called MotionBased which can slice and dice and analyze this track data and tell you lot of cool things.

Here's the MotionBased's analysis of Snoqualmie Falls hike.

Few interesting things:

• This is a 1.4 miles hike with 475 ft elevation gain.
• The hike takes about 35 minutes.
• Ascent and descent speeds as well as times are roughly same (note that I do not made any stops except at ends of the trail).
• My speed while ascending is 2.4 mph and vertical speed is 14 ft/min or 840 ft/hr. Not too bad.
• This hike has average grade of 16%. This is just 1% more than max allowed by typical gym treadmills. At steepest point the trail is 30% grade while about the "safe" max limit on typical maintained trails.

Using my watch which can measure elevation I thought that was 300ft elevation hike. Obviously my watch can easily be 100ft off. Here's the elevation profile of this hike:

Treadmill Grade to Angle Conversion

Gym machines like treadmills and even some roads express the slop as "grade" in percentage. For example, most gym treadmills allow up to 15% grade. I've left going to gym since last few months and instead I'm doing this Snoqualmie Falls hike almost every other day (which is 0.5 miles one way and 300ft elevation). But occasionally I have to go to gym because of early sunsets. I usually put max grade (15%) and speed walk for one mile burning 350 cal. So naturally the question is how many feet I climbed?

For this I need to convert grade in % to angle. But what is "grade%"? Turns out it's ration of rise/run or in other words,

 

So your vertical climb in feet is given by,

So by that calculation, at maximum grade on gym treadmill I climb 783.2 feet for each mile I walk. Not too bad.

Via conversation here.