Year: 2005

Big Boulder Trail in Downieville

Pimpbot talked me into this ride late last night. Wherewolf, UncleMTB, CHUM and Kip were riding Downieville and Pimpy wanted in. So… I threw my stuff together, got up at the crack of dawn (literally) and hauled butt up to Downieville. Only to miss the crew at Packer Saddle by about 15 minutes… So it was just Erich (Pimpbot) and I.

Eventually we caught up to them on Big Boulder due maily to an incident involving a bike in the bushes and a beesting on UncleMTB’s neck.

Absolutly awesome day and IMO some of my best pictures ever.

The Map Revisited

Rev 2 of my Trailhead Map is mostly ready. I actually crashed version 1 and don’t feel like fixing it because this version was so close to being ready. So what you get is almost all of the features I’d intended but I don’t have the database built completely yet. However even at this point I think it is pretty unique and cool. Currently the map includes the Folsom/ Auburn Area trails like the old one did plus a few others. I have a database backend on it now so I can add trails to it very quickly so I expect it will grow very quickly.

While working on this I’ve realized that my site has really started to become quite large and cumbersome at it is quite a chore trying to keep everything up to date. Also at one point in time I lost quite a bit of content and I need to rebuild it but time is just slipping by.

If anyone would like to help me add locations to the trailhead map please Contact Me! and I would love to set you up. Incidentally for those who have used my contact me link on the site and found it broken it is now a web form. You can email me at ogre -at ogrehut -dot- com or just use the form (which emails me).

Hacking

With this heat I’m not going outside much so since I’ve been stranded around the house I’ve been doing a little hacking on the web site.

Well I just finished what I think is a really cool new page for the site. It is a clickable, dragable, satellite photo enabled map with all the trails in the Auburn/ Folsom Lake area listed on it with links to trail reviews for each trail. I am hoping that this is just the beginning. I would really like to build a database with all of the trails in Norcal and link the database to the map. You should really check it out, I impressed myself this time :)

I also created an RSS feed for the front page stories on this site. There are a variety of ways RSS feeds are used but the primary way I use them is to create Live Bookmarks in my browser. You can also use a news agregator to allows give you a sort of birds eye view of all the sites you use. Lastly RSS allows sites to syndicate each others content to some extent. Still confused? Well fortunately I didn’t spend too much time on it and it doesn’t affect anything else on the site so don’t worry about it.

Tahoe Gathering Videos and Pictures

Well I did the Tahoe rides with the MTBR crew and had a blast. I only made it to two days, Saturday and Sunday.
The Saturday ride was a brutal 39 mile trek from Mt. Rose to Kingsbury Grade. I had an incredible time, the views were awesome, the riding great. But by the end of the ride my spirit was truly broken and I would have sworn off singletrack for life to get off the trail. Check out the pictures here. I made a video and you can find it on Google Video.  You can also check out MTBBill’s Pictures from the ride.
Sunday’s ride… it was amazing that there even was a Sunday ride after Saturday… we rode Toad’s Wild Ride. Of the few of us who were left there was little discussion about riding the full loop. Fortunately Char was there to shuttle us to the top so we didn’t have to fetch cars at the end of the ride. I got plenty of pictures but no video on Sunday. I’ll post them shortly.

Boggs Demonstration Forest Video

Had two days of great riding with UncleMTB at Boggs Demo Forest. We started out with a small loop for Char and Vivian then dropped them off and did a larger loop that included Game trail and part of Grizzly Trail. Game Trail is the windiest, most technical trail in the park and is unfortunately fairly short but it makes up for it by being a total blast to rip down. No pictures this time around but I did manage to get some great video footage of the rides. Sorry, Video Footage Missing for now

Grouse Ridge Ride

I hooked up with some guys from MTBR and we hit Grouse Ridge trail on the Fourth of July. Grouse Ridge is located off of highway 80 near Lake Spalding. The trails are extremely demanding physically and technically challenging, in other words a killer ride. Steve said the ride length is a measly 14 miles?? I can’t hardly believe that, it took us right around 6 hours (including a couple of long breaks at some highly scenic places). I can’t wait to get back. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my still camera so I didn’t take any pictures this ride. There are some pictures on Trogspace that George took. I did bring the helmet cam along and got some videos as well: Low Quality (43MB) – Higher Quality (74MB)