MTBGuru blog

We’ve added a link to the trip page in the embed code that you can use to publish a map on your own site. See screenshot below - ‘Trip details’ will redirect you to the actual trip page.

This weekend I went up to Tahoe with a plan: circumnavigate the entire lake by bike, on trails, as much as possible.
Bikes are only allowed on parts of the Tahoe Rim Trail (TRT) and some sections on paved road would be unavoidable.

I’d try to do it solo and unsupported (except for Starbucks breaks), in a day-and-a-half, and I wanted to camp out in the wilderness so I’d need to lug quite some stuff along. My original route proved to be a bit over-ambitious, but I did manage to close the loop, as the below map attests! (didn’t have much choice, actually…)

It was tough but a great and rewarding experience - only noticeable really after it was done ;). Read the full report, download the GPS track or check out many more photos on the trip page.

Highlights are too many to summarize here - ‘gorgeous singletrack with equally gorgeous views all the way’ would probably do it. A truly memorable trip, and if you take some more time than I did, you could add the Stanford loop, the Mount Rose section of the TRT as well as the Punisher to Big Meadows and Christmas Valley towards the end, to make it an all-encompassing best-of-Tahoe trip: over 100 miles, good for two or three days of epic riding.

Soquel Demonstration Forest, aka Demo Forest, is definitely one of our favorite local riding spots. Though it does take some determination to get there these days: it’s located in a remote spot in the Santa Cruz mountains and to to drive to the traditional starting point (coming from San Jose) one needs to negotiate a section of road which has almost completely been wiped out by a landslide - because of this, a part of Highland road is officially ‘closed’, though no one pays much attention to this fact. One of these days the road will probably disappear completely - just think that the probability that it happens while you’re on it can be considered to be pretty small, unless you’d be hauling a semi truck over it or so. Another concern is the occurrence of car break-ins at the parking spot, in particular on weekdays, when there aren’t much people around.

No problems whatsoever this Saturday though - only bliss and happy faces. The fantastic singletrack (Ridge! Braille! etc) was responsible for this but also the excellent folks of Trailhead Cyclery in San Jose who put up another one of their great ‘Demo at Demo’ events. Riders who showed up were able to test ride Yeti’s, Intense, Ibis and Specialized rigs. I took the occasion to give the Intense 5.5 29er a spin, a pretty sweet ride indeed.

A bike shop that goes through such efforts (hauling all that stuff into the middle of nowhere and staffing it the whole day) to please the local bike enthusiasts can only be recommended - thanks again THC!

On the photo below, some Demo candy of yesterday… more on the trip page!

A busy weekend is coming up here in Northern California: the Tour of the California Alps, aka the Death Ride, is starting tomorrow morning early in Markleeville. A bit later and a hundred miles from it the Downieville Classic mountain bike race will be on. Two great events to look forward to.

Last year’s Death Ride course (same as this year’s) is shown below. Check out the trip page for GPS or KML data of the ride!

It came a couple of weeks early for the National Holiday (July 21), and a couple days early for the Flemish Holiday (July 11), but the Tour de France today ended up being a Belgian party: Steegmans and Boonen 1 and 2, in a stage finishing in Gent (where yours truly was born).

Thanks to Versus (the former Outdoor Life Network) the Tour can be watched on TV here in California - at a safe distance from the crappy weather Northern Europe seems to be enduring now. And as usual, excellent blog coverage and link collections can be found on Ken Conley’s spare cycles.

Summer’s really here now and lots of great outdoor events are taking place or are on the agenda.

For instance, the Great Divide Race - the world’s longest non-stop mountain bike race - is currently ongoing. The premise is simple but brutal: the start is at the Canadian/US border, the finish at the US/Mexican border and in between are countless miles of dirt to be ridden, following a route snaking along the Continental Divide in the center of the Rocky Mountains. The first one to arrive wins - there are no stages, and in good mountain bike race tradition, the participants have to basically be entirely self-supported. An ‘armchair analysis’ of the event this year can be read on Dave Harris’ blog, an endurance mountain bike racer, who also has published a whole bunch of other very interesting articles on his site.

Or, how about the Climb to Kaiser race, a grueling 250km road bike race starting in Fresno in California’s Central Valley with as ‘highlight’ the ascent of Kaiser Pass in the Sierra’s at 9200ft - this took place last weekend and you can read a report on Matt Turgeon’s site.

Of course, other continents have their share of challenging events too: the Transalp mountain bike stage race in the European Alps and the Cristalp come to mind. And the upcoming Tour de Jotunheimen in Norway (430km) looks like an epic adventure of mind-altering proportion.

As for yours truly, I’m considering signing up for the E100 (tagline ‘mind over mountains’), but I’m not sure whether my mind will be up for that…

(Photo: col de Posettes in Chamonix)

This blog may have been taking a break lately, but we haven’t: we were for instance busy checking out the awesome trails near Chamonix in the French Alps! If you want to know more, check out this trip, or go visit Ian Mill’s 10fifty.com site (he’s been guiding for years in Chamonix) - if you need to rent a bike over there, go to the Zero G shop, they have excellent stuff (like the almost-new Stumpjumper I rented).

Meanwhile, it’s great to see that a lot of MTBGuru users have been quite busy themselves:

- The guys and gals from AIDSlifecycle.org, riding their bikes from San Francisco to Los Angeles, raising funds for the good cause along the way.

- Slow Way Around: the ‘Slow Travelers’, a couple from the UK, are undertaking a great bike/camping adventure throughout Europe.

- Lots of new and exciting looking routes from all over the world are being posted (for instance, the Scottish Highlands, in and around Calgary, down under in Australia, in France, etc).

This is all very inspiring and great to see - and sometimes a bit overwhelming: so many great trails and routes to explore, so little time!

Embedding a trip map on your own website or blog has become a quite popular feature. To do this, you insert a snippet of HTML code (an ‘iframe’), which is listed on each trip page, onto your own site.

By default, the size of the embedded map is 500 pixels wide by 500 pixels long, giving you a street map view with zoom level chosen such to contain the entire track.

From now you will be able to change these settings and customize the way your map looks.

Let’s take a look at the code:

At the end of the iframe’s URL, appended right after the question mark, you see attributes ‘width’ and ‘height’ (which are bold faced here). To get a different map size, just change the numbers of pixels listed - make sure though to also change the corresponding “width=” and “height=” properties following this: add 10 pixels to width, and 65 pixels to height, to avoid ugly scroll bars. for instance, this code creates a 600 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall map:

You can also add new attributes to change the appearance of the map:

• fit: default = 1. When set to 0, the map won’t scale to fit the track any longer, and you’ll have to provide your own zoom parameter (see next item).
• zoom: Google maps zoom level. A higher number increases the zoom level and will show more detail (if available).
• type: default = 0. When 0 -> show street map. When 1 -> show satellite view. When 2 -> show hybrid satellite + street map view
• first: default = 1. When 1 -> show a marker on the first point of the track.
• last: default = 0. When 1 -> add an additional marker to indicate the last point of the track and center the map around this marker.

You can append these to the iframe’s URL while separating them with ampersands; you can specify the options in any order you want and you can omit them if you’re happy with the default value.

This may all sound a bit complicated but it is very simple, just take a look at this example:

The changes with respect to our original code are indicated in bold: the map size has been changed, a zoom level of 12 is set (the map doesn’t simply just fit the track any longer) and a hybrid satellite/street view is shown.

If you’re using embedded maps or are planning to do so, make sure to play around with this, and give your map the look you prefer.

News has leaked about an upgrade to the Garmin Etrex family coming later this fall, including a new ‘high sensitivity’ receiver - it’s unclear whether this will be a SiRFstar III chip or something else. Due to its compact size and mapping and navigation capabilities, the Etrex units have been quite popular for hiking and biking (easy to mount on a handlebar). Their crappy sensitivity though has always been problematic - it seems that this is about to change, and that would make them pretty great GPS units for mountain biking.

As pointed out in the GPS Tracklog blog, one of the things advertised in a (leaked) Canadian GPS catalog (see image below) is Galileo compatibility (by means of a chip module that can be added later), which shouldn’t get you too excited as the earliest Galileo is now projected to be functional is 2012…
(Galileo is the GPS project of the European Union)

Below: the new Vista ‘HCx’ (in Canadian dollars…)

This has been overdue for a while, but we believe we’ve squashed enough bugs to finally ditch the beta! And that black font in the logo was getting old too.

So it got time for a new logo. The background image is still (roughly) the same - anyone recognizes the typical profile of the horizon (hint: it’s in the San Francisco Bay Area)?

It’s also exciting to see the rate of new trips being created increasing (trip id numbers are now over 1500), with some very interesting examples that we’ll feature in a later post - finally, new features are coming your way, too!