Sugarloaf Mountain

Pedaling up Sugarloaf Mountain was much harder than I anticipated. The hill rises around 300 feet in just over 1/2 mile, over a 10% grade. I had to stop once to rest on the way up, my heart reaching max heart rate. While I don’t wear a heart rate monitor, I can tell my heart rate by how I feel; above 100 beats per minute (bpm) – starting to breathe faster, above 120 bpm – feeling winded, above 140 – gasping for breath, above 160 (max heart rate) – have to stop to get my heart rate back down since I can feel my heart and veins beating through my chest, neck and ears. The view from the top was beautiful. Unfortunately the photo does not capture the scene very well since the sun was obscured by clouds from an approaching cold front. Soon I will be huddled inside my trailer while a strong cold front with 25 mph winds rocks my little home. Lake Apopka can be seen in the distance. The lake is 12 miles long, 9 miles wide, and is the third largest lake in Florida. The skyline of Orlando was visible over 30 miles away. The water from this lake actually flows northward into the St Johns River and then eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.

The geology of Sugarloaf Mountain is quite interesting since most of Florida is so flat. I live near the Gulf of Mexico 17 feet above sea level. The only hills there are the bridges over the intracoastal waterway. Florida is essentially where the continent of North America slowly dissolves into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. If I understand the explanation from the referenced text from Wikipedia correctly, this area formed a coastline two million years ago. The hills were formed by sand dunes and ridges.

From Wikipedia –

“Sugarloaf Mountain’s geology is tied to the formation of Florida’s sand ridges, specifically the Lake Wales Ridge. The mountain consists of relict sand ridges and dunes formed in a marine shoreline environment approximately 2 million years ago during thePleistocene epoch. Since the Pleistocene, the sands comprising the mountain have probably been uplifted due to isostatic rebound of the crust beneath the Florida Platform. The uplift is attributed to the karstification/erosion of the platform, which is reducing the weight on the underlying basement rock, triggering a process similar to post glacial rebound.”