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.

Out for the season

Messing Up my knee back in February was a blessing in disguise, maybe even a life-saver. My knee and ears hurt bad enough that I went to see my primary doctor, with whom I had not seen in five or so years.  My knee hurt from the bike injury and my ears hurt from hearing my incredible wife wanking everyday about me needing to go have that looked at.   Instead of looking at just my knee, my doctor insisted on doing a full workup as if I were a new patient.   After reviewing my medical records, she took note of a diagnosis of a faint heart murmur about 20 years ago.   She referred me to a Cardiologist.

After my initial visit with the Cardiologist and an EKG (A bunch of wires, pads and holes in my man sweater afterwards), I was called back in a few days later for an ECG (ultrasound of the heart).   A few days after that my Cardiologist called me and informed that my faint hear murmur had degraded into moderate to borderline severe Aortic Stenosis with regurgitation.   Basically, my Aortic Valve was not opening and closing properly and it was allowing non-oxygenated blood to backflow into the chamber where the oxygenated blood is at.   This is causing my heart to work harder than it should.   I was not having any of the typically symptoms of fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain and numbness in the extremities at the time.    My Cardiologist was quite the straight shooter with me in that the only way to fix my particular condition was with surgery and it would most likely need to happen within a year or two max.   He set me up for a six-month follow-up with a stipulation that I should call him if any of those symptoms develop.

Looking forward to getting back out here

Between then and now I became more self-aware that I was having some of those symptoms.   Fatigue, well I’m not a spring chicken and getting old sucks.   Shortness of breath, well yeah when I’m climbing a steep hill on my bike and …I’m no spring chicken.   Now for chest pain, I cracked my sternum in 2004 in an MTB crash and I was chalking that slowly growing discomfort up to being visited by the ghost of bike injuries past.   (Which is a thing…when you are not a spring chicken.)

In late September, I had that follow up round of testing with my Cardiologist and things had continued to degrade.   I was not completely surprised when he told me it was time to take care of this.   Failing to take action now could result in permeant damage to my heart beyond the valve and put me at escalating risk of an “unscheduled” cardiac event in the next 1-5 years.

On  November 11th, I had open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve (with an bovine valve #prostethitic_heart_valves).  I had already had a cardiac caterer procedure and no other work was needed such as stints or bypasses.    I spent five days in the hospital and I am now recovering at home. Currently I’m in the “sucks to be me” level recovery at home which should glide slope into “does not suck as bad to be me” recovery for a total of two to three months.  If all goes well, I’m expected to be able to resume normal life (to include mountain biking) around mid-February. 

After the initial diagnosis back in March, I made a serious commitment at eating healthier and getting fit beyond just mountain biking. I feel like I was pretty close to the fittest and healthiest I could possible be going into the surgery. I was working on the premise that the “Stronger In…Stronger Out” mantra would apply for my recovery.  Between all of my fitness recording devices (fitness watch, heart-rate monitor, Peloton) I have a good set of baseline metrics of where I was at pre-surgery to geek out on as I work my way back to where I was and beyond. Right now the focus is on letting the heart fully heal. The big stick in this recovery tent is going to be my sternum healing up.

I had to give my primary doctor a huge Thank You.   I know myself well enough (now) to realize that if she had not sent me to that cardiologist, I would have continued to press on with my life and chalking up those sneaky symptoms to just having a tough time staying in shape as I age. I think we as mountain bikers are often limit pushers. We push ourselves to be fitter, faster, more skilled, or at any number of aspects of the sport that we love. I think along with that goes a bit of just suck it up mentality and push on through. I recommend that as your vintage starts getting interesting, you should not assume that fatigue, shortness of breath of just generally having a tougher time being able to do what you used to do is related to just the date on your birth certificate. It would be better to be on the safe side with a check up, because it is always better to out on the dirt than be under the dirt!

The knee is all better by the way.   #AfterMarketHeartParts

Mt Saint Helens Video

Riding at Mt Saint Helens on the Ape Canyon Trail and Plains of Abraham is a pretty incredible experience. From old growth forest to riding across the destruction from its eruption there is something here that should move you as a human. I went out to Windy Gap onto the top of the Smith Creek trail before heading back. This video on the back portion of the ride. The views here absolutely amazing. Here is my blog post from that outing.

What an amazing place

This video sit around for over a year as the audio was horrible. The Hero 5 did not have particularly good audio in the first place but my gimbal was having issues as well as it was starting to get noisy enough that the mics of the GoPro focused on that noise and it also managed to start picking up my heartbeat. The whole setup was aggravating. I thought about just covering it all up with music but I was able to get it mostly wrangled in with some filters in post. The video does not do this place justice. If you are ever in the area I highly recommend this place.

I had been out here the year before and the weather was not cooperating. I did shoot video on that trip and looked at incorporating some of it into this video but none of it made the cut. Here is my blog post from my 2018 visit to this area.

Downieville 2007 – Remastered

I finally got around to remastering this video from playtime in Downieville.

Downieville 2007 – What an awesome trip!

Got through this footage, I am very thankful for the modern era of tiny GoPro cameras and gimbals. I did some stabilization work on some of the clips, but it is a balancing act between cropping and smoothing out the video. Crop too much and the field of view gets to narrow and quality goes down. Clearly I need to get back up to Downieville and get some modern footage!

Futzing at La Costa

I recently upgraded by GoPro cameras and replaced a gimbal I retired. I finally broke them out at to tinker around with the setups. La Costa is pretty much a local trail for me so that was where the tinkerfest was held.

While I managed to goon up some of the footage with the gimbal in wrong mode or the mounting positions not best for all conditions I did get some usable stuff. I put most some of that together here.

I moved from Hero 5s to Hero 8s and I am quite happy with the audio in in Protune mode vs what I had to deal with on the 5s. I have added wind mufflers over the mics in addition to setting changes.

The hypersmooth of the GoPro 8s is really good, almost gimbal quality. So why the GoPro 8 and not the 9? Well quite simply the 9 was not out yet and I got a screaming deal on the GoPro 8 while working on a military base overseas. All told, I got two GoPro 8s for $425 out the door which is almost Buy One Get One Free compared to MSRP.

For those of you you ride at La Costa you will most notice there are a couple of scenes where things look amiss. When I had the gimbal in the inverter mounted position, if I leaned over a certain about in a turn, the gimbal would flip and lock on to stabilizing in that inverted position. I flipped the vertically in post, but forgot to also flip in horizontally as well. I did not notice this until after the video was published.

Wildhorse – SART

It has been a while since I had been on the Wildhorse and Santa Ana River Trails so it was time to fix that.

I meet my long-time friend Bill (aka MrMountainHop) at bottom of Middle Control. We left one lockable beer container here and took another to top of the Wildhorse. We have often included an out and back effort up to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain (9,952ft) but for today we just started with smiles on the opening descent of Wildhorse.

Happy Bikes

There is a climb to be done on Wildhorse and he is always a fair bit of work. I could tell the additional riding, weight loss and time on the Peloton is paying off. While I was no speed demon I’m pretty sure that was my quickest effort to date. The views from the top of this pretty awesome today. We had to just chill for a while and enjoy it.

Hate we have to resort to putting in a tube

The run down Wildhorse was pretty awesome but we did take an extended break for Bill to sort a pesky puncture in his sidewall right at the bead. It ultimately required dropping in a tube.

Views from the forest service road that goes up to the top of Wildhorse.

Both Bill and I were on our game and were really enjoying. Woots and hollers could be heard through the canyons on many parts the ride. There were a couple of sections were I started see plaid in my peripheral vision as we approached the lower boundary of ludicrous speed. The Swartz was with us. I did not take many pictures.

After coming off the SART we had maybe a quarter mile of downhill fireroad back to Bill’s lockable beer container. We were just cruising at this point when Bill got caught up in some loose stuff on the edge of the fireroad while setting up for a turn.

He went down hard and immediately knew he was good and hurt. After a bit of assessment it was clear he had broken his collarbone. I soon went down to the bottom and drove his vehicle up to where he was at. I fashioned a sling out a flannel shirt and a bandana.

It was not a comfortable ride for Bill back up the dirt roads to the top of Wildhorse where my truck was at. Things were actually easier for Bill driving back down the mountain as having a steering wheel to hold onto helped keep his upper body more stable. His awesome girlfriend and a posse meet us in Redlands to takeover the driving back to LA.

We both agreed we had a killer time minus the whole collarbone snafu at the end!