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)
This has been a pretty awesome week. Sunday I did my first MTB ride since my heart valve replacement surgery in November. The big litmus test was having enough upper body strength to lift the bike up onto my over the bed truck rack on my truck. I had also been doing some tooling around on the bike on the street and curbs and not being jostled so it was time to give the sternum (along with its titanium wire reinforcements) some mild strength tests.
Orosco Ridge and Pamo ValleyLower Santa Ysabel Truck Trail Area
The climb up onto the ridge was good and it was so nice to be doing some huffing and puffing on a real bike out in the sunshine. I also checked out the Lower San Ysabel truck trail. All of which was in good shape. My sternum felt pretty good but there was mild discomfort over some of the chatterish stuff. None of the discomfort rose to the level of a sneeze! All together about I did 15 miles and change with about 1,400 feet of climbing.
South side of Lake Hodges
Wednesday, I went out to South Lake Hodges. Well I actually parked on the North Side and took the bridge over. My tenure at riding this place predates the bridge so I still refer to them as two separate places. But I did the typical Southside stuff and then made my way over to the Highland Valley trail. At this point it was pretty obvious that most of my workouts have been no longer than 60 minutes so I took bit of a break. After that I was back at it and the Highland Valley trail was a fun as I remembered it. I decided to do a touch of road connection and made my way over to Raptor Ridge. I was pretty tired after climbing Raptor Ridge and I was going to close out day with a return back via Mule Hill.
The bottom of Raptor Ridge. I ran out of gears shortly after those rocks 🙂
I was almost back to the kiosk area of Mule Hill when I was stopped by an SDGE crew who had the trail closed for some pipeline work. There was no detour so I had to backtrack about 2 miles to get back onto Highland Valley road to get then work my way back around. The trail should have been close at the last trail junction where people could divert around. While this was inconvenience for my tired legs. There was a hiker who got turned around that was really bummed. I did make them aware of this and hopefully they apply some common sense on where they close at for the remainder of their workdays.
All together I got in about 25miles and 1,200 feet of climbing. It was more than I had planned and I was well whooped. It is so good to be back on the dirt and certainly better to be on the dirt than in the dirt!
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.
