As a rainy-day exercise I tried to answer the question: where are the three steepest hills in Thailand, according to Google Earth? My nominations are:
#1: 59 degrees at 19.85063,99.06698 on the 1249 from Nor Lae to Ang Khang. The winner.
#2: 57 degrees at 19.21699,98.03487 on the 5035 Elephant Trail The first-runner up.
#3: 56 degrees at 19.85568,99.05691 on the 1249 from Nor Lae to Ang Khang
These could be the steepest three hills in Thailand, but there may be others that are steeper that my prospecting did not uncover. There are many hills over 40 degrees, and over 30 degrees is routine, but there are very few hills over 50 degrees, let alone almost 60 degrees. I used to have a Willys M38A1 jeep and its maximum rated slope in low-low 4WD mode was only 70 degrees.
Let’s try to perfect the top-three list. You can use Google Earth to plot the elevation profile of a challenging road to measure its steepest slope (plotting more than about ten km at a time reduces the peak grades, probably due to averaging, so you need to check less than 10 km at a time). Enter the start and end coordinates in the Directions boxes, then right click on the resulting route and click on Show Elevation Profile to see the peak and actual grades. If the resulting route isn’t what you expect, then you have to use Google Maps together with Google Earth. Or you can PM the coordinates of a suspected steep hill to me and I’ll help plot. It’s much easier the second time!
This is just the measurement of the grade of one hill and doesn’t indicate how steep the rest of the road is or how difficult the hill climb is considering the surface, curvature, width, and visibility. For that, you can look at the “Steepest Roads” thread.
#1: 59 degrees at 19.85063,99.06698 on the 1249 from Nor Lae to Ang Khang. The winner.
#2: 57 degrees at 19.21699,98.03487 on the 5035 Elephant Trail The first-runner up.
#3: 56 degrees at 19.85568,99.05691 on the 1249 from Nor Lae to Ang Khang
These could be the steepest three hills in Thailand, but there may be others that are steeper that my prospecting did not uncover. There are many hills over 40 degrees, and over 30 degrees is routine, but there are very few hills over 50 degrees, let alone almost 60 degrees. I used to have a Willys M38A1 jeep and its maximum rated slope in low-low 4WD mode was only 70 degrees.
Let’s try to perfect the top-three list. You can use Google Earth to plot the elevation profile of a challenging road to measure its steepest slope (plotting more than about ten km at a time reduces the peak grades, probably due to averaging, so you need to check less than 10 km at a time). Enter the start and end coordinates in the Directions boxes, then right click on the resulting route and click on Show Elevation Profile to see the peak and actual grades. If the resulting route isn’t what you expect, then you have to use Google Maps together with Google Earth. Or you can PM the coordinates of a suspected steep hill to me and I’ll help plot. It’s much easier the second time!
This is just the measurement of the grade of one hill and doesn’t indicate how steep the rest of the road is or how difficult the hill climb is considering the surface, curvature, width, and visibility. For that, you can look at the “Steepest Roads” thread.
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