The highest point of anything? I know that this can be read so many different ways. The highest point of my state, the highest point of the county, or even the highest point of the world! You could adapt it to buildings, mountains, man made elevations, or natural ones. You could even stand on your friends head to get to the highest point of them. This is Everyday Life though, and this is BARTPA. Thus, this is my city to explore and learn, my environment to experience further, and that is exactly what this task made me want to do. By the end of this praxis, I will have been in two of the highest points of something in my city, and one of the highest points of something in the nation. To be honest though, it's not three separate points, there is one overlap.

Just reading this task made me realize that I have absolutely no idea where the highest land elevation is in my city- the city I've lived in for 25 years, my entire life. Sure, I've endured biking some of its hills and cruising down the other side. From biking I have spots that I'd swear were the highest. Are they truly even close to the highest land elevation in my city, though? To figure this out, I had to locate the exact point of the highest elevation. As usual, the internet knows everything.

What is the highest point of elevation in St. Louis you may be asking yourself? Well, it is apparently 614 feet above sea level, at these coordinates of longitude/latitude: 38° 36′ 22.12″ N, 90° 16′ 53.1″ W (38 Degrees, 36 feet, and 22.12 inches north, 90 Degrees, 16 feet, and 53.1 inches west.) You can see the exact point marked on this map.

This spot is located in a place appropriately named 'The Hill.' The Hill is mostly a neighborhood of Italian descent, and if you are curious about the area, you can learn a bit about it here. It also has wonderful dining, if you were wondering.

Before I had even figured out where the highest point of elevation was in St. Louis, I had decided that I was going to bike to it, to compare it to my normal rides. Now that I've found out where it is, I'm almost a little bit disappointed. The exact point is 2.53 miles from my place of residence, barely off the exact route that I used to bike to work everyday up until July. So, without knowing it, I've literally been at the highest land elevation in St. Louis dozens of times, or have I? My route to work took me down Arsenal street, right past Sublette, which you can see on the map. Since the point is just barely off of Arsenal, and on Sublette, I've yet to technically be standing on the highest point in St. Louis, which is just unacceptable. The ride to the highest land elevation in St. Louis must continue! Charting the ride on MapMyRide.com, (Which is a great site, by the way!) shows that at the lowest point of the ride I reach 499ft above sea level, and the highest point is 614ft above sea level. That implies a minimum of a 115ft climb over the 2.53miles. It's actually more than that, as the entire route is fairly hilly, so I'm going up and down quite a bit.

Now, I've basically made this ride multiple times. Daily, in fact, and I don't really remember it being that bad. I remember it being harder on the way to work then on the way back, but outside of that, I don't remember cursing the fact that I chose to bike to work. The thing that is going to make this a little bit more interesting, is the fact that I'm not going to ride my bike for this. My precious, fairly expensive, pretty nice, ninja black, perfectly tailored to my height bike with twenty-four hill destroying gears (Of which I really only use ten or so, but still.)


Instead of taking this wonderful machine, I'll be borrowing my friends steel framed, overly heavy, out of tune, maintenance-needing bike with a single gear that cringes and cows in the face of hills. For those of you that are familiar with bike sprockets, this thing is sporting sprocket sizes of 52/12 in the front/rear, respectively. For those of you that are unfamiliar, that basically translates to: 1.) ridiculously hard to start pedaling, and 2.) even harder to go up hills. It's the equivalent of parking your car at the bottom of a steep hill and trying to go up the entire thing in fifth gear. If you even make it, it's a horrible waste of energy. It's the perfect example of why gears are a wonderful thing. This bike will indeed make the journey much more interesting. In comparison my bike has a 48/38/28 front chainring, and a 12-24 eight speed rear. (I really wouldn't mind having a 52 on my front chainring though...) So my biggest front gear is still smaller then his front gear, and my rear gear gets as small as his, but also has seven other gears that are bigger. One of them even twice the size. For the front chainrings, the bigger they are, the more difficult it is, and for the rear, it's the opposite.


I gave my friend a ring and told him I'd like to borrow his death trap for an hour or so. He was puzzled by the fact that I actually wanted to ride it, but he agreed. I walked down to his house, grabbed the bike, and gave it a quick look over before I jumped on it. After looking over the bike, I realized it was in much, much worse shape then I had thought. The chain was stretched and it was missing a brake. The pads on the one brake were worn and improperly toed in. Neither of the wheels were true, with the front being the worst. The brake cable was frayed. Finally, it made a horrible creaking sound with every full wheel rotation. I sort of laughed to myself, mumbled something about suicide, but decided to press on. The point of choosing this bike was to make the journey more interesting, and it will certainly do that.


I'm not completely crazy though. I decided that I should alter my route to include less busy roads. If the bike fell apart on me, I didn't want it to happen when I was riding in front of, or directly to the side of a car. Arsenal is a fairly busy street in this area, and I can't avoid being on it. I can avoid being on it the whole ride though. I decided to take Hartford down as far as I could, and then switch to Aresnal. As I'm riding down Hartford, I'm laughing at the bike as it creaks and groans with the wheel rotations. I'm also getting stared at from concerned people on the sidewalks that are hearing the thing. A portion of this is downhill, and I was reluctant to gain much speed. I didn't want to have speed if something went wrong.
Things started to get interesting quickly. Before I had even made it a tenth of a mile the sky decided it wanted to add to my fun by tossing a little rain into the mix. I don't normally mind rain. I do mildly mind rain when riding a death trap. Once again, I decide it'll just make the entire ordeal more interesting and decide to continue on.
As I start to climb a decent hill, tragedy struck. I assume the extra force and weight applied to the front wheel/axle from the climb was too taxing. It turns out all that creaking was the axle on the end of it's life. Midway up the hill, a loud crack sounds, and the front wheel begins swaying back and forth, bouncing off of the brake pads on either side. Luckily the front wheel was the one with the brakes, or the entire wheel may have just came off and broke under the sideways pressure. A couple of ball bearings actually ended up spilling out of the gap in between the wheel and axle. My ride was brought to a complete halt. Somehow, I was able to keep my balance long enough to get off the bike. Had the entire wheel came off, the bike would have collapsed on the fork and I would have ate pavement. My teeth thank the wheel for staying on.


I called my friend and told him I was bringing his bike back, and that it tried to kill me. I implored him to get it fixed, but he has another bike that he likes better, so I doubt it will ever be ridden again. (Update: Another friend of mine told me yesterday that my friend offered him this bike. I had to laugh a bit and tell him that it wasn't much of a gift, but I'd attempt to put it back together as cheap as I could for him if he took it.)

I still haven't made it to the highest point though. So, after almost taking a really bad spill on a death trap of a bike, I decided it's now ok to take my bike in it's place. Oh, how I love my bike.

The ride there on my bike was mostly uneventful.


This is at the top of a slight, steady incline upwards. It doesn't look like much really, and it wasn't horrible, but slow, steady climbs can get annoying after a while. Especially when they end at larger climbs like the following....



You can see the picture captions for a little more detail, so I'm not just repeating myself here.

I had a couple complications though. One being that my front chainring somehow got damaged, so it wasn't working correctly. That knocked out my top gear, and thus my top speed. Since the way there was climbing, I wasn't really going to hit top speed anyway, but it did take away some of my fun on the way home. Normally I like to zip down all the way from Sublette down to Kingshighway, since it's basically all downhill. I hit 30-35Mph+ and if I get lucky the stoplight is green and I get to fly through the intersection and up the hill on the other side. It always makes me smile, especially when you are keeping pace, or passing cars going down the street. When the light is red, it's really bothersome though, as I lose all the momentum. The other complication wasn't really a complication. It was more of an event of sorts. When I stopped to take a picture at the bottom of the hill that climbed to the highest point, I was approached by a man. This man walked up to me and said, "I know you. I know you. I've seen you before at a Quicktrip." Considering Quicktrips are my preferred place to get gas, this didn't surprise me. I also haven't drove a car in a couple months though, so it was a little bit interesting. The man continued, "I saw you in a Quicktrip. I thought you were so hot. I just wanted to let you know that. What are you taking pictures of the street for?" Great, awesome. I just got hit on by a forty+ year old man who looks half homeless. Here is the picture I was taking when he approached.


I asked if he would let me take a picture of him, but he declined. I figured he would have let me, and then I would have proof of how homeless he looked, but alas. He then proceeded to attempt to make small talk, and continued with compliments.
"Oh, thanks, umm, I'm on a schedule, I've gotta go now. You have a good night, ok?"
And so I continued on my way to the top.



Once there, I attempted to take pictures in every cardinal direction to show the descents from the highest point. The pictures came out way to blurred to be used, sadly. Doing that made me notice something though...


Noticing that, I of course had to go to the other hill also.


Map here


It may be harder to tell in the picture then it was in real life, but it was clearly a higher point here. The only reason I can think of for the discrepancy is the tennis courts near by. Perhaps when they were leveling the ground for the tennis courts, the extra dirt was dumped here and had grass planted over it. Either way, I was on top of both points, so I felt satisfied. My bike and I made the journey home, and along the way accompanied another biker. He was the type that decked himself out in a racing suit with the aerodynamic helmet and a bike five times more expensive then mine. He caught up to me at a stoplight, smiled, and when it turned green, gave it hell to go up the hill on the other side. We sprinted it out from Kingshighway to Morganford (About half a mile) for fun, with him finishing two bike lengths in front of me. Those two lengths were the two lengths he got on me at the starting point when the light changed, but once we got going we about paced each other. It was amusing and a nice way to end my ride to the highest point.



(Post Script- In case you were wondering...Yes, the Arch is the tallest building in St. Louis. It is also actually the tallest national monument anywhere in the states. I've been to the Arch multiple times. You can actually go up these old, crappy elevators on the inside of it and get to the top. It has a few windows on either side you can look out of. Since the Arch is curved, the elevators frequently have to adjust to level themselves out. It's an interesting ride to the top that takes roughly four minutes of shaking and climbing. While you are at the top you can actually feel the arch sway sometimes, depending on the wind. The arch can sway up to 9" each direction, but the usual sway is .5". I've added in a trip to the Arch to finalize my highest point. The main point was the highest land elevation, as I found that interesting and actually wanted to find it, and experience the journey to it. I added on the Arch because it's a Saint Louis staple. It's what we are know for. I've been to the Arch multiple times, so I didn't want to focus too much on it in this praxis. I do have one really notable thing I have to add though. I live in South City and I don't normally bike downtown since I have no real need. Biking downtown, visiting the Arch, biking down the riverfront, through Jefferson Memorial Park, and up and down various streets made me love my city again. It's really beautiful, and I take it for granted sometimes. This task gave me the chance to explore that, and rediscover my city in a way that has made for a wonderful day. I haven't enjoyed myself this much while alone in quite sometime. I even had to call my sister and tell her that I like St. Louis again. This is a personal thanks to SFØ, BARTPA, and this task for giving me a reason to make this happen. I think I'll be biking downtown more often nowadays. Back on track...I'll leave you with Arch pictures, and finish my story here, as I think the pictures for the Arch are enough to tell it's story. At the end of this, I have successfully made it to the highest land elevation in Saint Louis, the highest building in Saint Louis, and the tallest National Monument in the entire United States. Please, enjoy the pictures of downtown, even though I promise they won't look as good as they did in person.)