KOM Crusade

A quest for the best cycling hills in Connecticut

About

This site serves as blog of sorts for a dude from CT who likes cycling up hills and creating overly complex blogs. My original plan was to only list hills I have ridden, but I got overly excited and also started including a handful of hills i've scouted and can sense they will be epic. Hopefully it motivates me to go and ride them soon! Those hills are marked with the ⚑ rating.

The concept is to only include hills that have some amount of intrigue, be it difficulty, scenery or strava notoriety. I am trying to get representation from all corners of the state, it's not just all about you Kent! Am I going to include some of my local neighborhood hills that might not be worthy? Yea probably! If you don't see your favorite hill listed it doesn't mean its not worthy, I probably just haven't got to that area of the state yet. Or maybe I have and it really is a dud! I also travel quite often to Portland, OR so I reserve the right to randomly include hills from that area as well.

Proprietary hill ranking system

⚑ - haven't ridden yet, will hand down my judgement soon!
★ - worth doing1
★ ★ - prettttty, prettttty, prettttty, pretty good 2
★ ★ ★ - highly epic
1 - One star doesn't mean it's a lousy hill. If it wasn't any good it wouldn't be listed at all!

FAQ

Hey man, haven't you heard of pjamm?
It's true, sites like pjamm are great tools but they tend to focus on the hardest/biggesst hills. But what about the short and obscure hills? They need some love too! What they lack in FIET they make up for with charm and grit and the fact that I have ridden them :)

Hey man, couldn't you just use the Strava segment explorer?
The explorer is a good way to find climbs for sure. One issue is some epic short hills don't have an official categorization, so it's pretty hard to distinguish them all those crazy flat segments or god forbid a downhill stretch. On the flip side, there are a good amount of categorized climbs that are long boring slongs along busy roads.

Are you going to just keep finding any reason possible to rationalize this blog?
I think you know the answer...

You are missing a really good climb!
Fire that hill on over to dan@komcrusade.com !

I'm a fellow nerd wondering what yo tech stack is?
I'm rolling with that hot new Sveltekit on the frontend, leaning on mdsvex and mapbox. Hosted on netlify with headless cms presented by tina.io