A Quick Ride... Doumont Tr., Okay Mt. & Sundew Gate

It was pretty good weather yesterday and I figured some of the ice and snow might have cleared up through the tank traps on the Doumont Trail entrance to the logging roads.  I headed out, made it through the traps traps and managed to get half way along the trail that skirts the east side of Okay Mountain.  I was eventually stopped by ice and snow as the altitude buggered things up for me and eventually I returned to the lower roads.  So... I headed off towards Round Lake and rode the routine route to Sundew Gate.  The gate is easily passable now that the quads have obliterated all the hard work the logging people went to in blocking the gate. :)   Here's an iPod time-lapse video from the Doumont Trail entrance, through the tank traps and up a new (active, dead end) logging road that has appeared near turn for Okay Mountain trail (eastern edge).  BTW, when old farts go riding in mud puddles, they always poke them with a stick to check the base!  Watch the video and you'll get what I mean:

Another Cheesy Time-Lapse Movie

I decided to have another go at making a time-lapse movie today.  Galloway Gulch Trail seemed like a perfect choice; it's really local, it's below the snow line and I didn't get an accurate GPS track of it yet.  Here's the routes:

The red route (top to bottom) runs from Galloway Gulch Road to Jameson Rd.  The orange spur goes from the main trail up to a bivouac overlooking the Doumont area.  Surprisingly, both trails matched my earlier guesses of these routes quite accurately.

Here's a YouTube time-lapse video of the ride.  The movie starts at Allsop Rd (off Jingle Pot), runs the length of the Galloway Trail where it turns 180° at the yellow gate before turning left onto the bivouac spur trail.  Sure looks good on the even road surface, but the bouncing on the trails reduces the quality substantially.  The opening title is incorrect:  my iPod battery decided to cut the movie short!  In real time it's only about 40 min, and the total running time is only 2:30.  I can't believe the changes on this trail since the summer; they've logged the crap out of it!

 
Here are a couple of Garmin camera shots too:

The bivouac at the end of the orange trail

From the bivouac, looking out towards the Doumont Road area

Mounting Arrangements

I picked up a Garmin Montana and a Ram handlebar mount quite recently.  It doesn't position itself as low as I thought it would but it offers really great visibility when it's mounted in position near the left wing mirror.  I think the shorter riser might have been a tidier arrangement, but I'm really pleased with it all the same.  It's not wired in yet...  That's another project I need to get to before the spring.

The iPod Touch fits tidily into a bum bag above the headlight.  Vicki was kind enough to let me burn a hole through her bum bag with a soldering iron so the camera lens can see through!  :)  It wraps around the steering column tightly and points that sucker straight ahead.  It's perfect... even better than Paul's "Nancy Boy Man Purse."

Cheesy Timelapse Video of the Doumont Trail

I've been waiting for weeks for the weather to clear up enough to head out for a ride.  A window appeared today after waiting hours for the fog to clear up, so I left for a ride up the Doumont Trail around 2:00pm.  I've been playing around with a $1.99 app on my iPod Touch called "Time Lapse" and I wanted to give it a whirl on the bike.  It works well in the car when it's pointed down a long stretch of road and when it's not being bounced around like a cocktail shaker, but on the trails it's going to be a different story I think.  The results weren't too great.

There's still a fair bit of snow and ice up there on Doumont.  I felt the rear wheel slip around quite a bit today and so I didn't go too far up the trail.  I turned a few hundred metres before the tank traps.  Come on springtime!

Here's the cheesy video: