This post is almost a year late, but better late than never.
I’ve always wanted to be able to bike from my house to go ski. I finally got the motivation near the end of June 2023 and gave it a go.
The whole point of this trip was to see how hard it would be to do human powered adventures from your doorstep, eliminating the CO2 emission from driving to your destination. Beyond this being a mini adventure, it was also a chance for me to do the quick calculations on the CO2 cost of doing adventures.
GEAR:
I thought about how to carry my gear up the mountain on bike, but opted for just shouldering everything. It felt like the easier solution…
Bike: (8.5kg)
Winsapce G2
Gear ratio 44 x 11-46
Skis + bag: (10.3kg)*
BD helio 95
Atomic backland carbon ski boots
Osprey kamber 32
Pack would be closer to 11kg if I remembered by skins and ski poles… So I ended up walking up to the top of Mt Seymour.
Calculations: How much do I actually save??
These calculations are usually best done with average fuel consumption for your trip and average power output.
On average, my car uses about 8.7l/100km going up to Mt Seymour and back (44km). This is about 3.8L of gas @$2/l = $7.6 for a round trip. This equates to about 9kg of CO2 emitted.
My Garmin said I average 180W over 2h to get to the parking lot of Mt Seymour and back down. That is equal to roughly 1.5 cliff bars worth of energy and depending on how efficient your body is at converting O2 (about the equivalent of 30-40mL of equivalent gasoline burned) This number is highly dependent on your body’s metabolic rate, car used etc. I'm just estimating my output compared to my car. The only accurate way to measure this would be in a lab with a CO2 gas monitor during exercise. So my ad hoc method of measuring fuel saved is tabled below:
| Curb weight (kg) | Time Elapsed (mins) | CO2 emitted (kg) | CO2/kg |
bike to ski | 90 | 120 | *0.09 | 1g/kg |
Driving | 1340 | 30 | 9 | 7g/kg |
*assuming metabolic rate based on literature number. https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archived-posts/sciblog/index.html_p=186.html
Even assuming we exhale a lot of converted CO2 during exercise, it’s remarkable how different the numbers actually are between the two modes of transportation.
Back to the trip…
The day I chose to ski was a super foggy day. I forgot my ski poles… And skins… No matter, I only planned on going up to Mount Seymour from Lonsdale Quay. What is normally a <2hr day, turned into a huge 4hr day of door to door suffering. Most of the suffering from learning what my butt feels like cycling with an extra 20kg of weight…
The skiing was terrible, but given I was skiing at the end of June right by my house, I can’t really complain! Some variable snow conditions with pockets of that elusive corn snow!
Would I ever bike to ski again? I probably would. I’d probably plan it better and put more thought into a rack system. Here's a video of me suffering...
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