# Crowded contour plot lines

Many thanks to Harish Kumar for getting me this far. He made an immense difference with a single character here :)

I have a contour plot that is, to be frank, ugly. The surface it was generated from was not very smooth. In the picture below, it's (obviously) the one on the right

I've been looking for a way to reduce the number of labels, and the closest I've found is this solution...but it doesn't get me there.

The code to produce the plots is below. The data files can be found on pastebin. CAG_Contour.dat is here and PPR_Contour.dat is here

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
\usepgfplotslibrary{groupplots}
\usetikzlibrary{pgfplots.groupplots}

\pgfplotsset{compat = 1.12}

\begin{document}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{groupplot}[
group style={
group size=2 by 1,
xlabels at=edge bottom,
ylabels at=edge left},
xlabel = {\footnotesize $\alpha_{++}$},
ylabel = {\footnotesize Departure Rate}]
\nextgroupplot[title={\scriptsize Come and Go}]
contour/label distance=125pt,
contour/every contour label/.append style={every node/.style={black!50,fill=white}},
contour prepared,
contour prepared format=matlab]
table {CAG_Contour.dat};
\nextgroupplot[title={\scriptsize ++Resources}]