Is it time to PR Lookout?

We trace the road from the Pillars to the Post (using OpenStreetMap) and split it into ~100 m pieces, noting which way you're riding on each. For every piece we work out how much of the wind is at your back versus in your face. A 10 mph west wind is a 10 mph headwind when you're riding west, a 10 mph tailwind riding east, and roughly nothing riding north or south. Lookout switchbacks so much that the same wind usually helps on one leg and hurts on the next, which is why we check every piece.

The "On the climb" number is the average of all those pieces, weighted by length. The verdict goes a step further: it estimates your speed on every piece from its grade, your power and the wind, then adds up the seconds. That matters because a headwind costs more time than the same tailwind gives back.

The wind is a forecast from Open-Meteo, which blends two NOAA models: HRRR (a 3 km grid, for roughly the next day or two) and GFS (13 km) beyond that. We check it at 18 points up the climb, but the whole climb only covers a few grid squares, so most of those points get the same reading. Treat the later days of the forecast as rougher.

We'd love to. There are personal weather stations at the bottom (Beverly Heights) and near the top (Tollund Wx), linked above the map. Their data lives on Weather Underground, which only gives API access to people who register a station of their own, and doesn't let other websites read its pages. Scraping it anyway would break their terms and would probably stop working without warning. So for now they're links you can check yourself. If one of the station owners wants to share their feed, we can plug it in.

It's a rough estimate of how many seconds the wind adds or saves compared to a perfectly still day at the same power. It assumes a road position (CdA 0.32 m²), decent tires (Crr 0.005), the thinner air at ~6,500 ft, and that wind at rider height is about 70% of the 10 m forecast. It's a ballpark, not gospel. Trees, rock walls and the Windy Saddle all do their own thing.

Close. We start at the first hairpin above 19th Street (the Pillars) and finish at the point on Lookout Mountain Road closest to the Buffalo Bill turnoff (the Post). Distance may differ by a few hundred feet from whichever segment you're chasing.

Lookout is shared with cars, runners and a lot of other people chasing PRs. Hold your line, don't cut the switchbacks, and save the heroics for the uphill.