The Bicycle Trails Council of the East Bay is looking for a new Board member to take responsibility for coordinating trail work days with parks, land managers, training volunteers on trail-building technique and promoting work days to various cycling groups. The time commitment is about a year with regular monthly meetings, but work days are commonly planned in winter and spring in the Bay Area, due to workable trail conditions. Please inquire with Brent with any further questions.
The Cal Recreational Trail Planning & Development Project is creating a master plan for a new, multi-use recreational trail within UC Berkeley’s Strawberry Canyon, east of Memorial Stadium. Interns will gain hands-on experience in project management, landscape architecture, environmental impact assessment and trail planning.
If you love mountain biking, hiking, trail running, parks and recreation, and the great outdoors, this is a great opportunity to be involved in a project that will create a unique outdoor experience that will be enjoyed for generations to come. If your interest is environmental conservation, this is a great opportunity to design a project with the potential to turn today’s outdoor athletes into tomorrow’s environmental stewards.
For more information and to apply for this internship:
http://www.internshipin.com/listing.php?id=159
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Santa Cruz Bicycles has been very generous and has donated this “you pick it” frame set to the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship to aid us in our fund-raising efforts during the holiday season.
This auction on eBay includes your pick of any of the following:
* Blur XC
* Blur LT2
* Blur 4X
* Nomad (2008)
* Bullit
* Heckler
* Superlight
* Chameleon
* Jackal
* Juliana
* Stigmata
Snow in the East Bay Hills
Even as low as Tilden park (around 1,000 feet), we had snow. Its a shame I woke up with a cold this morning, otherwise, it would have been great to head up there to ride in it! It looks like that straight red line was a faster moving vehicle than the upright (bicycle?) red light thing that appears stationary.
In other news, Alpine Meadows opens Friday. My other other bike is a snowboard. Woot!
What is “trail”?
~from the ever-glorious Wikipedia
“A factor that influences how easy or difficult a bike will be to ride is trail, the distance that the front wheel ground contact point trails behind the steering axis ground contact point. The steering axis is the axis about which the entire steering mechanism (fork, handlebars, front wheel, etc.) pivots. In traditional bike designs, with a steering axis tilted back from the vertical, trail causes the front wheel to steer into the direction of a lean, independent of forward speed.[5] This can be seen by pushing a stationary bike to one side. The front wheel will usually also steer to that side. In a lean, gravity provides this force.
The more trail a bike has, the more stable it feels. Bikes with negative trail (where the contact patch is actually in front of where the steering axis intersects the ground), while still ridable, feel very unstable. Bikes with too much trail feel difficult to steer. Normally, road racing bicycles have more trail than mountain bikes or touring bikes. In the case of mountain bikes, less trail allows more accurate path selection off-road, and also allows the rider to recover from obstacles on the trail which might knock the front wheel off course. Touring bikes are built with small trail to allow the rider to control a bike weighed down with baggage. As a consequence, an unloaded touring bike can feel unstable. In bicycles, fork rake, often a curve in the fork blades forward of the steering axis, is used to diminish trail.[10] In motorcycles, rake refers to the head angle instead, and offset created by the triple tree is used to diminish trail.[11]
Trail is a function of head angle, fork offset or rake, and wheel size. Their relationship can be described by this formula:[12]
where Rw is wheel radius, Ah is the head angle measured clock-wise from the horizontal and Of is the fork offset or rake. Trail can be increased by increasing the wheel size, decreasing or slackening the head angle, or decreasing the fork rake.
A small survey by Whitt and Wilson[5] found:
* touring bicycles with head angles between 72° and 73° and trail between 43.0 mm and 60.0 mm
* racing bicycles with head angles between 73° and 74° and trail between 28.0 mm and 45.0 mm
* track bicycles with head angles of 75° and trail between 23.5 mm and 37.0 mm.”
Seasonal Bike art
In seeing the cover of the East Bay’s monthly magazine circulating at my new job, I’ve become more convinced that cycling is staking its claim on the economic tragedy, by recruiting a larger community. In asking for permission to share the artwork, I learned that Andy Singer is not simply a talented artist whose put out a handful of comic books, and has a steady feed of new material on his website, but he’s also a real cyclist living in Minnesota; someone who enjoys riding in the elements as much as in social events. Enjoy the images.
Turning Wheels for Kids
In San Jose today, hundreds of cyclists got together to build bikes donated by various vendors and manufacturers to be given to underprivileged children. It was a massive effort in organization, as well as in piecing together all those bikes. Congratulations to all those participating in the event!
Some tips for new riders…
There was snow on Mount Diablo, this morning. That’s not common in California… so many of us are ill-equipped. I launched onto my trainer in order to get a sweat going, and have been inside most of the day. I can see that lots of other people are thinking about getting suited up for winter riding, as well. Dirt Rag is all about the wool.
In constantly trying to find new information about riding in the Bay Area, I use Google Alerts to automatically be sent information published to the web, targeting specific words or phrases. Today, I came across a very general post, which had some useful tips that I thought I would share. I’ve been thinking about posting a general tips article as well, focussed on handling skills and trail etiquette. Readers, feel free to post any ideas or requests in the comment section and I will address it.
Close Moon
Mother Earth has staked her claim on the seasons,
With waning daylight and moonlight at the cross hairs.
A snowflake in conception
As a golden leaf falls from the tree.
We enter the frigid North;
Forlorn witness to Sunshine.
Tonight, the moon is closer than its been in 15 years. I noticed the incandescent glow on my ride home, and even took a few pictures before hearing the official word that tonight’s moon is closer to the Earth than its been in 15 years. In fact, I even like how my cell phone camera enabled me to be a bit of a cubist artist, with its naturally pixellated ways capturing the piercing light through the layers of cirrus clouds (as the weekend’s freezing storm rolls in).
