MTB Single Track (06/11/2015)

This was the definitely the best day I have ever had on a mountain bike!

The hills around University of California Santa Cruz have possibly the worlds largest collection of fantastic single track MTB trails, so when Scott said he could lend me a bike and take me along on a trip he was making with a friend of his, I was very glad to accept. It turned out that Scott is a tester for Specialized, often riding stuff that will only be announced a year later. He was able to get me a really nice bike: Full (adjustable) suspension, tubeless tires that never let me down no matter how steep I tried (or dared) to go up or down. With 1x11 gear setup and a spring-loaded seat post which could be adjusted while I was riding I had a blast. Thanks Scott!

Today I downloaded LiDAR point clouds and data from OpenStreetMap in order to generate a proper map of the area we covered, the main problem was getting the best possible contour detail: The default point classifications as I got it from NOAA simply skips over any area with dense tree cover, generating almost no ground points. When I used LAStools to improve this, my standard settings ended up generating knolls around every large tree. :-(

Since this is a Redwood forest of the same type as where they filmed the "Return of the Jedi" Star Wars film, with lots of those really large trees, the resulting map was completely unusable, but after a couple of rounds tweaking the parameters used to skip over non-ground objects, I got the map shown here.

It should be very obvious that this area would be great for any kind of MTBO race!