Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Category: Website Updates

Cuyamaca – BLT Video Remastered

I have been working on remastering some of my older videos to bring them up to new standards.   My videos range from ancient lip-stick camera and 8mm camcorders to GoPros.     All of various eras of equipment will have their own challenges to remastering and some of them I’m just not going to make the time for the effort required.   But I am going to make an effort.

The video above is from 2007 where some of the usual suspects of the time rode from the Cuyamaca mountains over to the Lagunas by way of the Deer Springs and Indian Creek trails.   It was about a 40 mile day of great fun!

Neck muscles of steel!

This video was shot with a 1080i Canon HDV camcorder.  It shot good video with the exception of the image stabilization.  It used optical image stabilization which was consider really good for the time.   However it was optimized for handheld work and not for the rapid bouncing around that occurs during use as a helmet camera work.    I’m pretty sure that the optical image stabilization often made things worse not better.   It certainly did not work as well as the electronic image stabilization that was on my previous standard definition camcorder setup.

I had previously remastered my Galbraith Mountain video from 2009 but did not try to do any software stabilization of the video.  Many moons ago I tried software stabilization and did not like all the artifacts it created in the video.

For the Cuyamaca – Laguna video I gave the software stabilization another shot.   I’m using Adobe Premiere  CC 2018 and it has warp stabilizer effect/filter built in.   After a bit of trail and error I found some setting that work well enough.   There is a balancing act that has to be done with with the 1080i footage between smoothness and clarity.    The filter will do a good job of stabilization but at the cost of cropping the footage.   When the footage is cropped the clarity of the footage is decreased.    I found that trying to keep the crop below 125% typical kept thing looking good.   Some scenes I did not stabilize at  all.    Overall I’m satisfied enough with it as it is better than the windows media format stuff I was previously using.     There will be some more of this coming in the future.

San Juan Trail

Okay it has been quite a few moons since I last rode the San Juan Trail. This past Monday I made a return trip. The trail is the trail over course but I was a little taken back by the condition of those bottom 10 switchbacks that you open up with.

Those switchbacks have always had thier troubles with errosion and they were pprobably the more maintenance intensive bits. That being said these switchbacks have damn near been replaced with lollipop turns. Here is an older picture of that section.

Take a look at the switchbacks now.

They are all rounded out. WTF? People were making those turns on downright arcane MTB rigs. With all of the modern bike tech that is out there right now why is this happening?

I have my theories. Most of them involve some type of rider/tech with “tard” or “hole” added to the end of it.

After mentally grumbling about how much easier and less rewarding these switchbacks now are to clean I realized another fact. This trail still goes freaking uphill. Its good stuff. This was my first “epic” trail and still a classic in my book.

I did not do the lollipop on this day. I was plenty fine with heading back down after chillaxing at Cocktail Rock for a bit.

The descent rocked

Black Mountain – RB

My day job was been rather pesky by infringing on my Saturday so I only had to time to squeak in a short ride.   I had not been out to Black Mountain in Rancho Bernardino.    In had been at three years and change since I last rode here.

Looking west from Black Mountain

I knew some development was in the works in the area but I was a little surprised at how much at been developed since I was last our there.    I will definitely need to update  my page on this area as there home where some trails used to be.       The good news is the open space park is under good stewardship and the San Diego Mountain Biking Association (SDMBA) have a good relationship with the management of this area.   Some new trails are in the works and in progress.

Miners Ridge Loop

I did a counter-clockwise loop from the baseball fields along the service roads to the summit, night hawk, miners ridge and the lilac trail.    All of it was in pretty good shape.    I am going to make a more concerted effort to update things with the latest on this area.   More to follow on that.

Website/Blog Recovery in Progress

I am in the middle of recovering from a webhosting transfer, backup/restore failure.   While the static webpages are back online (with the exception of interactive maps), the blog has issues.     The appearance has to be rewickered and entries from 2013 up to the middle of 2017 have to basically be rebuilt.

UPDATE – 11SEP18:   All of my data and photos have been recovered!!   Some of the external links are not going to work due to database index changes but the content is all there.   I still need to redo the appearance theme of the blog.

UPDATE – 18SEP18:   I now have a new blog theme, tweaked to mesh up with my regular site better.   You will find that it works much better with mobile devices than my previous setup.

The Crested Butte 401 Trail

Wow, I have been away from the BLOG for way too long.   Between work being….well…WORK and a ton of other life things I have been away from the keyboard.   The 401 trail is thoroughly covered in snow right now but I finally finishing off my pictures and notes from the fall Colorado trip.

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I spent a few days in Crested Butte and got in a couple of great rides.  One of those was the 401 Trail.

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Here is the webpage with all my pictures and some blabbage from the ride.

The Monarch Crest Epic

I have spent the last month working out of the country and pretty much had no-time and less mental energy to finish up my pictures and thoughts from my Colorado trip.  The Monarch Crest trail was my day six excursion and it did not disappoint.   Much of the route is part of the both Continental Divide and Colorado Trails.  This is certainly a bucket list quality trail that I’m super stoked to have ridden.

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View from along the trail

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Nudging up close to 12,000 feet of elevation.

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Looking down into the Silver Creek drainage that I would soon be riding through.

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Near the bottom of the Silver Creek Trail.

Check out the rest of the pictures and ride description here.

Utah Pages Added – Updated

Magic Carpet Ride
The Magic Carpet Ride Trail on Little Creek Mesa

Following up on my recent road trip to St George I have updated my Utah section of the site.   I have added the following pages:

Guacamole
The Boy Scout Trails
The Zen Trail

I also updated the Little Creek Mesa page with an updated map, GPS files and pictures from both this most recent trip and a 2013 trip.  I also have enough Utah trails on the site now, that I split them out from the “Other US Trails” section to try and make things a little more organized. (It is still a little wonky)  I also split out Colorado Trail into its own section, but that section looks a little light.   Time to plan another ROADTRIP!