I had a sore lower back on Saturday that I was unsure of (I think I picked my daughter up wrong Thursday night) and no particular ideas for a longer ride so I decided to do a quick loop that I'm calling the Upper South Hill Loop on bikely. It's a fairly lightly trafficked loop that follows the periphery of Spokane's South Hill from 65th all the way down to 17th for a total distance somewhere in the vicinity of 24 km (my bike computer says 24.5, google says 23.5). It took me just about 55 minutes and my back actually felt great during the ride (although it stiffened up a bit afterward).
<
p id="routemapiframe" style="border: 1px solid #d0d0d0; background: #775555 none repeat scroll 0% 50%; overflow: hidden; width: 450px; -moz-background-clip: -moz-initial; -moz-background-origin: -moz-initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: -moz-initial; white-space: nowrap">Upper South Hill Loop
Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com
On a bikely related note I discovered two semi-hidden features while I was working on creating the above route: a cue sheet view (here's the Upper South Hill Loop cue sheet) and route elevation graphs. The cue sheet view requires additional labeling work when creating the route, but it works pretty well. I can see myself using this feature in the future to map out a new route and practice navigating by cue sheet.
The elevation graph is pretty cool as well. The upper south hill loop actually has more elevation change and climbing than I had realized. Thinking about its graph also just gave me two ideas: creating a truly hellacious hill workout loop going up and down the South Hill and/or the goal of riding up every significant South Hill north south route from bottom to top at some point. There are a few really busy arterials like Grand, Stevens/Bernard and Ray that would probably best be ridden up on an early weekend morning, but it would be cool to ride each of them at least once just to say I've done it.