Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Category: Video

Rapter Ridge Video

Raptor Ridge (Located near Escondido) the Mule Hill and San Pasqual Valley Trails goes between Lake Hodges to the west and along the agriculture fields to the east in San Pasqual Valley. The high point along this route is Raptor Ridge. There is a little something for most XC style riders as beginners can enjoy non-technical relatively flat terrain on either side of the Raptor Ridge and work their way into climbing the ridge.

This footage is from an outing where the trail conditions are pretty much perfect. AKA Hero Dirt! Here is my webpage on Raptor Ridge along with Mule Hill and the San Pasqual Valley.

This trail is also part of the the Coast-to-Crest Trail which when fully completed will travel 70 miles from Vulcan Mountain near Julian to Del Mar on the coast.

Yeah Yeah, Yeah stop your rambling Bill and give me a track to follow already. Strava for this ride (Includes a lot more stuff than just Raptor Ridge)

Amasaback Moab 08

The migration of videos to YouTube continues. This installment is from Amasaback Mesa in Moab Utah from a 2008 Roadtrip. This was Day Two of trip and we had started the day on Little Creek Mesa near Hurricane Utah. The Hurricane/St George Area is such a good halfway spot between San Diego and Fruita, Moab or the North Rim of the Grand Canyon if you are itching to get in some riding on what would otherwise be a long travel day.

Day Two of a killer eight-day Roadtrip

This video is of the main route up onto the mesa and back down. I’m looking forward to getting back up on that Mesa and playing around. As I understand it there are now a couple of different routes you can take coming back down with the most aggressive being Captain Ahab. I like the idea of base camping out of Moab for a much longer amount of time than before and really getting to know the place. Plans, I got Plans!

Zushi April 2004 Video

All this remastering videos has really got me jonesing to get back on some trails. This video was from April of 2004 in Zushi, Japan. The area was also known as “Duck Pond” as one of the entrances into the area required a righteous hike-a-bike up a trail behind a duck pond. This area was also part of bigger adventures into the Tennin, Takatori, Yokohama Woods and Kamakura trail systems. I had some really good times out in this area.

Some of these trails document back 800+ years

At 1:40 you will see us pass by the back of the Kumano Shrine which was first built in the eighth year of the Japanese Genroku Era which equates to 1696AD. As best as I can research it was last refurbished in 1978.

At 2:52 and 4:45 until the end. We are on the Asaina-kirodoshi. It is one of the seven greater notches through the mountains leading to and from Kamakura. Kamakura is surrounded on three sides by steep mountain and the notches served as defensive passages and passes through the mountains back in “the day”. “The day” in this particular case one was 1241AD.

I have been in this area of Japan quite a few times. Check out some of my other blog posts from those trips. If you would like to see some some old school photos shot with my then fancy 1.2MP camera check out this old page.

Hangover Trail 2009

What a fun trip this was back in 2009 to hangout and ride with friends and make some new ones from the Over The Edge crowd. I have noticed that in the following years, the spot of my “mega-dab” has been shored up and widened just a touch. Here are my other ramblings and pictures from that day

Freshly remastered and put on Youtube

Gooseberry Mesa 05 Video

The next installment in the remastering project is Gooseberry Mesa near Hurricane Utah. This video was shot on day 3 of a 9-day Utah/Colorado road trip in the Spring of 2005.

This was my first visit to Gooseberry, but is was certainly not my last. St George and Hurricane is one of my favorite MTB destinations (certainly in the reach in one day and still get in a ride category)

I meet a lot of really cool people on this trip and many of them I still keep in touch with to this day. Such a great place to ride.

Ashinoko Skyline Video

Another remastered video from the Pre-GoPro Era of camcorders and burly neck muscles. While working in Japan in 2004, I had the opportunity to circumnavigate Lake Ashi (Ashinoko) using the lakeside trail and the Skyline trail. Lake Ashi is located in the Hakone area of the Kanagawa Prefecture of Honshu Japan. It is very scenic and Mount Fuji can often been seen from spots along the shore shore and the ridgelines around the lake. This was a big day out on the trails and a whole lot of fun. Here is my account of the day.

Idyllwild 05 Video

Here is the next video in the remastering project. This from a ride or two on the Hub Trails of Idyllwild. As this was in the pre-GoPro era, this was shot with a helmet-mounted standard definition digital video camcorder. You will see the shadows of this beast in the video from time to time.

Springtime in Idyllwild is pretty awesome!

South Mountain 08 Video

South Mountain in Phoenix is a a pretty impressive and technical trail system right in town. This is my latest video to be remastered into a modern streaming format. The video contains bits from two days (March 14th and 15th 2008) of riding here on the Telegraph, Mormon, National, Javalina, and Geronimo trails.

Such an awesome place to get your chunk on!

Man did we (Kevin, Greg and JD) have some fun on those trails. Here are some additional pictures and ramblings about SoMo. During our third day in Phonenix we did Goat Camp, but that is another story. I found some footage for Goat Camp that I never made into a video so I have put that on the get done someday list. But Goat Camp is another story.

Remastered Tahoe Video

I am using some of my off-bike downtime to remaster my older videos into modern formats and shift them over to my Youtube channel. I’m not sure remastered is exactly the right term for what I’m doing but it seems to fit. I am first focusing on videos that I already have an uncompressed full resolution file of the finished video. With these I am upscaling them to 1080P using the Adobe Creative Suite with a filter to help preserve some of the details versus doing just a simply upscale. With the said, there is only so much you can do with with 480P source video.

Along the Flume Trail July 9th 2005

The first video in this series (which I am shooting to get one done a week) is from the 2005 MTBR.com Lake Tahoe Gathering. This was a great weekend of riding mostly on the eastern and southern end of the area. I meet some really great people on that trip and some of them have been friends ever since.

Some of the hooligans’, scoundrel’s, friends and all-around good folk headed out to Driscoll Lake July 8th 2005

Here is the remastered video from that trip.

McKenzie River Trail Video

I rode the McKenzie River Trail in September of 2018 and I can certainly see why it was once rated as the best trail in America. It is certainly finds itself in the discussion when setting around the campfire. This footage has been languishing on my hard drive as it had all sorts of problems such as my gimbal was starting to go bad creating some high pitched noise that the camera was picking up. I also did not have the camera setup properly and created some lighting issues. I finally decided to put in the time to correct those things (as best as I could) and put together some clips from the incredible experience of riding this trail.

The McKenzie River Logo shown here is available as a sticker. See link in the description for details if you would like one.