Typical GORC rest day

Tuesday in Salida, GORC takes an easy day. This means we go to Alpine Tunnel, which is about three miles from the highest place you can park, along steady uphill rail-to-trail. This is not KATY trail, but an old narrow-guage railway that's been out of commission since 1910. The tunnel under the continental divide is closed so you have to hike or hike a bike to get to the other side. Narrow guage trains can climb much steeper than what we're used to, at least 5%. SO, at the town of St. Elmo's we're leaving a truck for later. About eight of us decide (stupidly) to ride the six miles to the high parking place, then ride the rest with GORC. Then we get to the tunnel, then hike on up to the continental divide, and see why Bryan "The Crusher" Adams chose the truck ride up. After 20 minutes of hike-a-bike, then huddling behind a rock for 15 minutes taking picures and cowering from the wind, the last five dumbasses take what we called the "hell and back" trail, which was a beautiful piece of little-used singletrack, most of it above 12,000 feet. Anyway, since we're on dialup out here, the pictures aren't plentiful. Here's a shot of Big Pun at the mouth of the Alpine Tunnel. Big Pun and Matt Hayes are not bound by earth's laws of physics. Somehow those guys can dish out the punishment, take more of it, and keep coming back for more. Both killed it today. Here's a rare shot of Greg taking a little breather at the mouth of the tunnel.


By the way, the first keg is long dead, so we got a bigger one for the second. It just might kill us.

No links today. I'm on vacation.

Rain N Shine



So it decides to rain on us after we arrived in Salida on Saturday. We had some keg and waited for the sun to reappear. As soon as it did we put together a haphazard ride out the door onto some local fireroads to Boss Lake. As we ascended it began to rain and the crew turned around and stopped at a local business (see photo). It let up and we attempted to climb the heinous fireroad. Scott, Matt and Ron made a left turn, leaving the others to their own fate. It began to hail and it hurt like hell. Ron and Matt stopped under a tree to make sure they were saturated with as much rain water before continuing. Kirby showed up and the 3 continued up a monster fireroad.

It never stopped raining and the temperature continued to drop. Lighting and thunder followed us up the steep hillside for over a mile until we crested onto Boss Lake. The fireroad literally ended in the lake waters and we had to skirt the bank until we reached uberknarl singletrack similar to the Worlds SS course.

We bombed down the wet and slimy trail, walking the blood prone sections, and landed on another fireroad back to basecamp. Kirby, Matt and Ron bombed the descent, absolutely frozen and soaked to the core.

Though only 3 of the 15 completed the first challenge of the week, it was a ride to be remembered by all.

GORC Makes Landfall in Salida!


The GORC crew has arrived in Salida, and true to form taken care of the important business first -- getting the keg lined up for the day. After some rest, we're hitting the trails for some riding. More to follow...

Press F10 to Initialise FMode

The SSWC pictorial through the eyes of the punmobile (matt, john, pun) is short but sweet...


Saturday night: After sleeping for less than 4 hours since Friday we all head out and get shitty and eat shittier chinese food. More or less, this was the attitude towards tools, poseurs, and race bred shonkies. we came to ride the ride. stay up late till about 4:30.




Again, later that night we hang out at the official race bar (the big easy). good times. then we met ray who is a small radio DJ whose focus niche is "avant garde." strange, but true. i assume that he's been growing is dread beard since he was 13 and is still completing college? definitely a surreal conversation.




The race went well. John and I pretty much chilled out the whole time and finished in about 5 and a half hours. brutal downhills and rocks everywhere. one downhill dropped 600 feet in a half mile, basically straight down. john rode the entire thing. i skipped about 150 feet because i want to go to colorado. this is a scene from the "wall" riders had to climb, or walk. it was the only spot we walked up hill (about a quarter mile.)

weird sidenote: of course we hung off the back in a race for last, but almost every rider we came across was walking their bike on 10% or less grades. weird shit. and many riders on zoot bikes have little or no tech, not even a hint of it. at least the last 50 or so.



after the race and missing the kart action, we hung out with the EVILcycling and Dirt Rag crew until absolutely everyone but us in the photo were left, thus claiming the title "SSWC Dead Fucking Last" status.

I hear it's in New Zealand next year. maybe...

SingleSpeed Worlds. Mini-report

Brian "Buck" Keich from PA your 2005 Singlespeed World Champ.




























More Pics at: http://www.pbase.com/dens/sswc_05

Enjoy. Full GORC report to follow soon....

SSWC-Keith Bontrager's Perspective (John Farinella's best friend)

The link above takes you to an intersting article by K.B.. He is apparently keeping a diary for teh 2005 season and it is pretty interesting.

Kirbs

GORC Socks


Here's the design for the GORC socks. All proceeds go back into the club for supporting your local trails. Ordering details will be on the website. Buy a pair of these 100% wool socks for yourself, and one for grandma, she'll love them.

God hates Castlewood



OK, that's no way to put it. God loves castlewood. He just has to let mother nature lay the smack down every now and then or there would be great unrest upstairs.




I was talking to Sam last night and he told me about some cool maps and storm descriptions on the NOAA website. Turns out the storms of August 13 were pretty notable, as evidenced by the manually drawn map of the five strong downbursts that hit the area that day. There are a lot of cool storm damage pictures there too (like the one below). To see other weather events around here you can just go to the abundantly useful St. Louis weather page (not the forecast) and click "recent events" on the left side of the page.



Unfortunately for us they hit Castlewood dead on and put a lot of trees down over the trail. Sam said he and the rangers "have never seen anything like it." One thing I learned in the old-growth forests of the porcupine mountains is that down trees are a great thing for the forest. They're not so good for the trails which are completely unusable right now.

That's why they're calling for help cleaning up. People who know what they're doing with chainsaws are doubly appreciated but anyone can be put to work.
Meet on Sunday August 21, 9:00 am at the Castlewood ranger station. See the gorc message board for more details.

LINKS GALORE:
August 13 event
Cool Aug 13 downburst map
Aug 13 Storm damage pictures
St. Louis weather central page
St. Louis recent signifigant weather events
Chat about trail cleanup
wikipedia entry for downburst

Gateway Off-Road Cyclists

Gateway Off-Road Cyclists

Remember a few years ago when that bunk doctor published that BS about cycling causing impotency firing off a frenzy of ignorance about your nads and their placement? Well, just when you thought it was a good idea to not get all sweaty riding bicycles and stay on the couch to read this blog we get this:

Wired News
Laptops Are Hot; Maybe Too Hot
By Bruce Gain

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,68163,00.html

02:00 AM Jul. 13, 2005 PT

It may be hard to fry an egg on a new laptop today, but notebook surface temperatures remain too hot for many users -- and the situation could get worse.

Contemporary laptops are generally cooler than their predecessors. In IBM's case, what it calls the maximum "skin temperature," or surface temperature, is 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit), which is considered an optimal threshold in the industry. However, laptop makers increasingly struggle to accommodate components that are more powerful and, consequently, hotter.

After dropping for a few years, CPU temperatures are "ticking back up" as customers seek faster, higher-power-generating laptops, said Jeff Lev, a mechanical-development engineer for the commercial portable sector of HP's personal-systems group.

Laptop temperatures also got more negative attention in December when researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook published a study in the journal Human Reproduction. The study showed a decrease in fertility among test subjects when laptops caused an increase of up to 2.8 degrees Celsius in the "scrotal temperatures" of 29 healthy male subjects.

Laptop temperatures are generally lower compared to five years ago, when CPU temperatures were largely left unchecked. Then, the higher wattages and heat outputs of faster notebook processors began to make battery lives and surface temperatures unviable for many manufacturers -- and users.

"Finally, (Intel) came around and said, 'OK, you guys are right: We want to increase performance but keep the power down,'" said Howard Locker, chief architect for desktop and mobile development at Lenovo for IBM.

Meanwhile, the CPU is not the only guilty party when it comes to notebook heat levels. Other power-hungry components, such as hard disks, memory modules and especially graphics processors -- with clock speeds now surpassing 500 MHz -- add to the heat-factor equation.

"Graphics is one of the things we see in the future that we are going to pay attention to so that we don't concentrate on the CPU and then have the problems we had five years ago all over again," HP's Lev said.

Laptop makers who spoke with Wired News generally did not predict that notebooks will become a lot cooler any time soon. However, they indicated that they will continue to spend plenty of R&D dollars on heat-management designs so surface temperatures of next-generation systems at least do not increase.

"The speed, then the heat, goes up, so we spend a lot of upfront time doing computation work (involving) fluid dynamics where we put in a bunch of scenarios in the computer and let it spit out solutions," Lev said.

For laptop makers, design challenges largely involve removing and distributing heat from concentrated areas, such as around the CPU chipset. Heat buildup in one spot can make a laptop too hot to touch in specific surface areas. Moreover, after certain temperature thresholds are surpassed, system components become unstable.

Laptops largely rely on heat pipes that use liquid coolants to cool and distribute heat away from the chipset. Fans also keep temperatures down, albeit on a smaller scale compared to desktops. However, the resulting designs see varying degrees of success.

"In some rare instances they do a really good job -- the larger the laptop the easier this is," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group. "But often either the bottom, the keyboard or the wrist rest become uncomfortably hot even with the latest processors."

On a CPU level, power is measured by thermal design power, or TDP, watts, which represent what Advanced Micro Devices and Intel say are the maximum values that system builders must accommodate. AMD's mobile Athlon 64 and Intel's latest Pentium M mobile CPUs keep the TDP down by regulating power according to the application being used.

CPU power-saving tweaks for notebooks have existed for some time. However, compared to models from years past, the latest generation of processors from AMD, Intel and Taiwanese CPU maker Via manage to gauge and shut down CPU clock cycles more efficiently when power is not needed.

AMD and Intel offer services called PowerNow and SpeedStep, respectively, which regulate multiple processor clock speeds and reduce speeds according to the computing task. This reduces overall TDP values, which both lowers heat levels and helps to save battery life.

"We are going to continue to go down this path to lower power," said Dave Everitt, European products and platforms manager for AMD. The company's Turion 64 products, for example, are designed to offer a TDP of 35 watts or 25 watts, Everitt said. A few years ago it would have been something like 60 watts.

Additionally, laptop PC makers have designed more intelligent BIOS software that is able to reduce screen brightness, a significant generator of heat and a drain on battery power.

"Our argument is that the hardware in a laptop is more than you need most of the time," Locker said. "If we can do intelligent throttling, or pulling back performance, then that is a good thing, because it makes your battery last longer and makes the notebook cooler."

When dual-core AMD and Intel x86 PC processor architectures become widely incorporated in notebooks next year, the move won't necessarily increase thermal output per processor, the chipmakers say.

"You might think that by doubling the core, you are then doubling the thermal output, but in fact it will remain approximately the same," said Mike Trainor, chief mobile technology evangelist for Intel. "There is a lot of engineering that puts together circuitry to make sure that for each core the thermal output will go up or down as needed by the software load."

It is usually the thinner and lighter notebooks for which heat is more of a concern. Smaller notebooks also pose the most difficult design challenges for PC makers, since there is less space for airflow and heat dissipation.

"Every time we have a market for a smaller notebook with added performance, that is when you have to stop and take a breath and ask: 'Can we really do this?'" HP's Lev said. "And there have been situations where we said, 'We really don't know if this is the best thing for us.'"

End of story. Now go ride and feel the burn, or teabag the closest person that passed out too early...

Google Earth Beta

This is a bitchin' little web-based program that takes USGS maps to the next level by interpolating them with 3d data points and giving you "depth" in your maps. Pretty sweet. Below is an image of greensfelder from a few years ago.



check it out earth.google.com

Episode III, the backstroke of the west




Some guy got a bootleg of the new "Star War" movie with English subtitles badly-translated from Chinese. It's hilarious. The jedi council became the presbyterian church... Yoda's a little pottymouth. Well, I guess we all suspected that one.

Anyway LINK:
episode-iii-backstroke-of-west

Stinkbait's Good Friend Keith Bontrager...



has an online diary of the TransRockies Challenge, a 7 day, 373 mile stage race with lots and lots of climbing. Seems like this is the North American version of the TransAlp Challenge which runs from Germany, through Austria to Italy.

GORC Special Ops Team HQ for SSWC05











Here's the formerly unpublished headquarters for the GORC Special Ops Team. We're packing 5 bikes, 5 gears, and a weekend supply of Malt Liquor. Let the mayhem begin. This may be the last photograph of this place while it's still standing.

SS Worlds Approaches - Hide Your Breakables

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Back from Porkies

I just got back from backpacking with a couple friends in the Porcupine Mountains in Michigan's upper peninsula, the Porkies, on the South shore of Lake Superior. There was also a pub nearby called Porkies but we didn't go in, or tie a rope to our car and pull the place down. I took a lot of pictures but haven't gotten a chance to put them up yet. We hiked about ten miles a day for four days in old growth forest and never crossed a road, not even a fire road or doubletrack section.

Our campsites didn't suck either. Here's one of them.



More pictures and a full trip report soon.

LINKS:
Wikipedia entry on the Porcupine Mountains
Michigan DNR Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park page

tom

Steph's new ride, Titus Racer-X

Back to School...OLD SCHOOL!!!!



Alright. Who's been around long enough to remember this one?




Sweet, Old-Skool Paul's derailluer, RASTA-Style! Mount that up on your Fat Chance Yo-Eddy and go carve up some singletrack!

Tha-Pimp... kickin' it retro since 1986!

Effects of Too Much Beer Consumption

Please don't drink beer before you send other people money.
If they can't tell the difference between those two, how do they expect people to be able to tell Bud Light from Miller Lite?

New MO bicycle Safety Law

I received this from a guy at work:

The 2005 Missouri Bicycle Safety Bill, promoted by the Missouri Bicycle Federation and other key bicycle/pedestrian groups across the state and passed by the Missouri General Assembly in May 2005, has now been signed by the governor!
Summary of the new bicycle safety law, SB372/HB487:
* Motorists shall leave a safe distance when overtaking bicyclists.There is a penalty for those who pass unsafely, and a more severe penalty when passing too close results in a collision. Having a specific offense for passing too closely will also make it easier to escalate to higher penalties when that is appropriate (for instance, when a driver purposefully passes too close in order to harass or intimidate).
* The first bicycle lane regulations in Missouri law. Bike lanes may not be blocked. Motorists must yield to bicyclists in the bike lane before crossing the lane. A bicycle lane is for preferential use by bicyclists but the bicyclists are NOT confined to the lane as is required by many other states.
* Updated the definition of "bicycle" in Missouri law to include adult tricycles and quadracycles (previously these were in legal limbo).
* When a shoulder is present, bicyclists may, but are NOT REQUIRED to, operate on the shoulder. Previously shoulder riding was technically illegal. This did not create much of a practical problem, because police did not enforce it. But it created a severe policy problem--how can you improve the shoulder of a highway for bicycle use, when it is technically illegal for bicyclists to ride there? How do you make a statewide bicycling map, which (among other things) shows which roads have shoulders and which don't? Now problems like these are solved.
* Bicyclists may indicate a right turn by raising the left arm to the square OR by pointing with the right arm. Research shows that pointing in the direction of the turn is the signal best understood by motorists. Now it is legal to do so in Missouri.
* Bicyclists hand and arm signals need not be given continuously if the hand/arm is needed to control the bicycle.
Links to complete bill texts:SB372: http://www.senate.mo.gov/05info/billtext/tat/SB372.htmhttp://www.senate.mo.gov/05info/billtext/tat/SB372.htmHB487: http://www.house.state.mo.us/bills051/biltxt/truly/HB0487T.HTMhttp://www.house.state.mo.us/bills051/biltxt/truly/HB0487T.HTM


See I use the Blog.

Kirby

New Frame for da-Pimp!


I heard from Edwin at VanDessel sports. Seems they have this cool "No questions asked" replacement policy.

For my old, broken frame, and $199, they'll send me a new VD frame!

Sweet huh? I love decent product support.

Looks like I'm still a VanDessel man. The new frame has a little gusset under the down-tube where it joins the head-tube. http://www.vandesselsports.com/buzzbombht.php?bike=7

So much for my Indy-Fab wet dreams...With $1200 change in my pocket...

Monthly Meeting Wed. 8/03

Monthly meeting at the Schlafly Tap Room 7:00 p.m.

The Pumpkin is DEAD!!



Saturday at Greensfelder, the Pumpkin died.











After the ride, I discovered a crack running about 1/3 of the way around the bottom of the head-tube/down-tube junction.

A tear was shed.

Now it's off the Independent Fabrications for a new frame!!! Maybe this isn't such a bad thing after all....

Oh honey? I "need" a new frame for my bike...