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.
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!
All this remastering videos has really got me jonesing to get back on some trails. This video was from April of 2004 inZushi, 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
