Over at her blog, cross-country ski racer Laura Valaas recently posted a couple pictures of her new training grounds in Anchorage, Alaska, and asked rhetorically, "Can you even imagine a more enticing little trail to have at the end of your driveway?"
While her two shots did, indeed, show some enticing terrain, I can imagine some pretty enticing trails down here in the Lower 48.
Here is the best - and hardest - uphill on my rollerski route: just over a mile (1700 meters) long, it has an overall vertical rise of a hundred feet - half of which comes in the last quarter mile (about an 8% climb). That's the Carleton wind turbine off to the right. It's a great thing to aim for, though if I ever hit it while rollerskiing, it'll mean I plowed through a quarter-mile of cornfield.
And here is the 80-meter-long climb at the end of my favorite and most frequent run in the Upper Arb, at the northeast corner of the Alumni Field. At the top, it's a right turn onto a nice smooth downhill almost all the way home.