Hike SF

Reux reminded me that the page was a little light on maps the other day, so I set aside a chunk of the weekend to add a few new features. Now behind each post is now a faint trace of the walk to which it’s referring, and for meta posts, all walks combined. These are built from the monolithic KML file of all hikes. They be browsable too, if boredom overcomes you. My fav is probably the one with the cactus.

Links to maps, both in Google Maps and KML, are linked on the side. You might be wondering: why can’t I show all hikes on GMaps? Because it’ll cripple your machine, that’s why. Try as it might, my browser can’t render all paths within 45 seconds, and dragging lags by at least ten. True, my machine is old and busted, but I doubt yours can do it in less than 20.

Posts now sport a hike map link near the top, which’ll take you to the path in GMaps. I suppose this might help one to figure exactly where I saw that hobo playing baseball, scary tree monster, or giant pile of rubble.

July 23rd was my hundredth day of the challenge–a fine time to take stock.

• number of walks: 64
• distance walked: 239.38 miles (385.25 km)
• average distance per walk: 3.74 miles (6.02 km)
• longest walk: 13.65 miles (21.96 km) on July 22
• shortest walk: 0.61 miles (0.99 km) on April 16

Typical walks are definitely getting longer. At first, hour long walks felt long, but now even a quick walk is an hour and a half, and weekend walks are usually at least three.

Chronicle authors, Herb Caen included, gave San Francisco 42 hills back in 1959. Years later, Hansen’s Almanac added one more. Tom Graham, the Chronicle’s walking man, added ten more. And Dave Schweisguth took away a few impostrous hills, but left us with 74.

The least I could do is lend a hand with mapping. So here they are, the famous 43 hills of San Francisco on Google Maps. I’ve also made them available via KML for those of you who want to take them with you.

To celebrate four hours of tedious mapping, I walked over two of the peaks this weekend. The picture above is the intersection of Wisconsin and Madera, the peak of Potrero Hill, 91 meters tall.

2008.03.01 edit: changed “dishonest ones” to “impostrous hills” to clarify that I am personifying hills, and not referring to authors. Tom Graham is one of my heroes, and doesn’t deserve even the faintest implication of being dishonest. Apologies to Tom.

Several folks have asked how I keep track of my progress. If my work as a sysadmin has taught me anything, it’s that I should never trust a single system to store any important information reliably. Because I don’t want to end up starting over–or massively backtracking–I keep track of things in three different formats.

First, I carry a small Moleskine notebook; when I turn onto a street, I jot down the name in a big long list. I use acronyms for street names pretty heavily, because really I only have to disambiguate amongst all streets that intersect a particular road. So the list might say, “SVN, 21, Shot, 23, V, 24 E.” That would be South Van Ness Avenue, left on 21st Street, right on Shotwell Avenue, right on 23rd Street, left on Valencia Avenue and ending at 24th Street.

When I’ve settled in at home or on the shuttle, I convert that path into black lines on a map of San Francisco that’s included with the notebook. I hash out finished blocks and typically spend a while cogitating about my next walk by pondering blank spots on the map. Unfortunately the book cuts off a large amount of the southern part of San Francisco, including about 80% of the Bay View, so eventually I’ll have to also get a complete map.

A few times a week I also plot my walks as paths in Google Earth, which is just a digital copy of the notebook. I slap a date stamp into the path name, sometimes include a few notes in the details, and then export a KML file. On my web server, a small script slices that into various meaningful subsets. You can look at the raw list of files here. I’m working on a page that will draw Google maps of any of these, but work has left me with little free time lately.

So there you have it, a completely paranoid way of redundantly manually encoding the same basic information over and over again. At least it doesn’t include Gantt charts.

Roughly a month ago I decided to try walking down every public street in San Francisco, a challenge which should end up taking more than a year. In the literal sense this page is meant to capture my finds and happenings along the way. But the real purpose is to champion divergence from the beaten path, even within the big city. Many great places in SF are tucked away on side streets, down alleys and in unexpected parts of town. For instance, along one of my first walks I discovered that the headquarters of the EFF is less than three blocks from my house, and just a week ago I happened upon an old beached schooner near the Mission Bay Marina that was full of flowers.

Estimates of the total distance of all roads in SF are dubious at best, but 850 miles sounds reasonable to me. That would be 17.3 miles of road per square mile of city, or one road every 300 feet if they went east-west across the peninsula.

Using that estimate, I’m roughly 13% finished today. On weekends I tend to take at least one three-hour walk, often two. On weekdays, I take increasingly circuitous routes from my house to pick-up points for the company shuttle. As you might imagine, the straight line paths between my house and those shuttle stops have all been completed long ago, so trips that once took 45 minutes now take an hour and a half.