Cold and Snowy

It seems like winter has finally arrived. This past week the highs didn't go much above 20 degrees and Friday night we had a dusting of snow. So in order to get some riding in I decided to take the MTB out. Chris and a few others were riding out of Mercer a 9:30 am but it was only 17 degrees at that time so I waited a couple of hours until it got a little warmer and decided to ride the canal path.

I headed over to Princeton and started the ride by Carnegie Lake. In the summer the path is a nice place for a quick trail ride along the canal. Today the coating of snow made it a little more scenic. Riding in the snow is not something you can do that often so when the conditions allow I try to get out.

I spent about a hour and a half on the path and went up to Rocky Hill and back. I took a few pictures along the way. It hovered around 25 degrees for most of the ride which is close to the my lower limit for an MTB ride. Any colder and my camel-back starts to freeze. Still if you dress right and keep moving its not too hard to stay warm. Although my feet were a little cold by the end of the ride I was warm otherwise and was glad to get out on the bike for a little while. There are a couple more months of winter ahead so you have to get out when you can.

Winter Exploring

This past Saturday was just a few degrees too cold and a little too windy to hit the road. I thought about taking the mountain bike to the canal but decided instead to check out a new trail that is a little closer to home. It's called the Union Transportation Trail. This trail runs from Davis Rd by the Creme Ridge golf course down to Millstream Rd just outside of New Egypt.

This trail was once the Pemberton & Hightstown Railroad. This was a short railroad line constructed in 1864 to provide dairies and farms access to the main rail road lines in Pemberton and Hightstown. The current trail is currently little less than 5 miles long but when finished it will be 8.6 and go all the way to the Assumpink. There are future plans to further extended it all the way into Hightstown.

The trail is crushed stone and pretty smooth. From the hoof prints and other debris on the trail I could tell it gets a lot of use by horses. Since this is an old rail bed it is relatively flat although if felt like a slight uphill in both directions. I spent about a hour and a half going out and back on the trail. It was a decent way to get quick ride on a cold day. I'll probably check it out again once they add a few more miles to it.

Star Trails

The weather since Christmas has been a little too cold to get out and ride. I don't mind the break but will probably do some mountain biking if it doesn't warm up soon. This break has given me a little time to experiment with my camera and do some long exposures of the night sky. I don't have a good DLR camera just a decent point and shoot. My camera does allow me to take long exposures of 15 seconds but this is really not long enough to get a good picture of the night sky. There is however some free software that you can use to stack a few hundred photos to get exposure of a couple of hours. This allows you to get some pretty cool long exposure shots that wouldn't normally be possible with a cheap camera. You can see my results of the first few tries from my backyard here. These aren't real spectacular shots but it proved the technique.

To create these photos I used two pieces of software. The first one was the Canon Hack kit that you can find here. The Canon Hack kit allows me to run a script that automatically takes a photo every so many seconds. This allows me to set up the camera to take a photo every 30 seconds for hours at a time. This way I just put the camera on the tripod pointed it at the night sky, push a button and walk away for a few hours. When I come back I now have a couple hundred long exposure pictures of the sky.

To create the star trail photo I had to stack all the photos together into a single image. This can be a tedious process in a program like Photoshop but luckily some one spent their free time creating a program to do this and best of all it is free. It is called Startrails application and you can find it here. It is simple to use and produces great results.  All you have to do is point the program to a folder that contains all the pictures and it will automatically stack all the pictures. It will also alternatively make a video out of the photos which I did here.

With the software the process is pretty simple. It only take a few minutes to create the star trail photo. So now that I have everything set up I will probably take some more of these when the sky is clear. With a little better composition I should be able to get some pretty cool shots.

The Epic Year in Review

The time between Christmas and New Year is usually when all the major news shows summarize the events of the year and of course there is jibjabs comic take which you can see here As I look back at this year myself I realized I had pretty good year with some fun bike adventures.

There was of course the now famous Epic of El Capitain then on the trip to Lake Nockamixon I was very politely told I was a lying bastard for forgetting to mention some of the hills along the way. I did a lot of hilly rides this year and even attempted Fiddlers Elbows and survived. Besides my normal weekend rides I took two bike trips. One to Lake Champlain and another to Gettysburg both of which I really enjoyed and plan to do more of in the future.

Of course it wasn't the steep hills, long miles or new roads that made biking fun this year. It was, as always, the people that joined me on these sometimes crazy rides. So for all of you that road alone with me thanks for making 2012 a fun year. I wish you all a Happy New Year. I will see you on the road in 2013 once the weather gets a little warmer and I promise some more fun rides in the new year.

Unexpected Snowbiking

Its hard to tell what kind of winter it is going to be but we have already had two small snow storms and of course the hurricane. This past Saturday I went up to visit my father who just had  knee replacement surgery. I took the opportunity to do some riding in north jersey where they live. It was too cold ride on the road so I decided to check out Allamuchy State park which has some popular mountain biking trails. I had not been there before but I found a couple maps online and it looked like it would be an interesting place to explore.

When I left my house for the drive up I knew it would be cold but did not expected there to be snow on the ground. There was a brief snow storm on Tuesday but it didn't really stick around here. As I headed north and got closer to to Allamuchy I started to see patches of snow and when I go to the parking lot there was snow over most of the ground although it was not much more than a half inch deep.

Allamuchy has 20 miles of mostly single track runs that go by a couple of lakes. I chose a easy 5 mile route that went past Deer Pond. The riding wasn't too hard although at times between the snow and the leaves it a bit slippery in places. After I made it past the Deer Pond I hit some of the harder single track trails. The terrain here is very rocky which makes it a bumpy ride.

There were a lot of trees down and across the trails so I ended up having to walk around a downed tree every half mile or so. This slowed me down a little and I ended up spending just over an hour on the trails and got a pretty good work out. I only saw a small part of Allamuchy they have a lot of nice trails so if I'm every up this way again I may explore it a little more.

My Trusty Baja

You need more than a good bike to be a serious rider. There is a lot of supporting equipment needed like spare tubes, tires, and an assortment of tools. You also need special clothing and shoes for each season and many other incidental. If you have to drive to where you are going to ride it also helps to have a good way to transport your bike.

When it comes time to buy a new car I always take into account how well it will work for carrying bikes since transporting bikes and people is part of almost every weekend for me. In October 2002 I bought a Subaru Baja as it seemed like a good car for everyday use as well as a great car for hauling me and the bike around.

Ten years later and I'm still very happy with the car. It's a fun comfortable car to drive and gets good mileage (25 MPG). Having an pickup bed in the back has been very useful for hauling, plants, dirt, wood and other dirty things that won't fit or are too dirty for the back of a normal car. The bed also easily fits 3 bikes with a custom rack I made.

This car has been able to do everything I have needed it to do. It is a little smaller than my last car a Ford Ranger pickup but it has been able to do everything my small pickup did and has a better ride and gas mileage. Its also has been very reliable car and at 80,000 miles it seems to have a lot of life left in it.

When the Baja first came out Car and Driver didn't think it was a car that Subaru needed to build. They didn't understand why some one would by a Baja when they could get almost the same utility from an Outback wagon. They were right of course and three years after the Baja came out Subaru discontinued it for lack of sales. For me however I'm glad they did build the car because it has been the perfect car to get me, my bikes, and my friends to our many bike adventures.

After the storm

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Its been almost two weeks since Hurricane Sandy came through and things are mostly back to normal. Most people have their power back on and there is no problems getting gas. There are still some down trees and debris laying around but most of the damage has been cleaned up.

Down the shore it is a different story. We have a small condo in Avon, just north of Belmar a block off the beach. We are on the 4th floor of a strong stucco build that weathered the storm well. We didn't have any damage but down on ground level its a different story. At the height of the storm there was probably close to 3 feet of water in the streets in front of our condo. This flooded the first floor of the condo which is a couple feet below street level.

When we arrived in Avon we saw the sand once we got a couple blocks from the beach. After the storm there was probably a foot or two of sand lying in the streets. This has been plowed to the side like snow and people were still digging out the sidewalks in front of their houses.

The front doors of the main lobby, of the condo, were destroyed by the storm and they were already working on ripping out the carpet and sheet rock on the first floor. This is not the first time this has happened.  About once every 10 years the first floor of the condo floods but this time the water was a lot higher. Although it will probably take a couple of months before the first floor is back in shape the rest of the building is fine.

If you take a walk on the beach you can appreciate the real power of the storm. There are some small parts of the boardwalk still intact but most of it is broken and bent or just plain missing. There are several buildings like the lifeguard station that got knocked off its foundation and are a total. loss. The worst damage is the public bathroom which came off it foundation and flipped upside down. It will take many months before they will be able to clean this up and start the rebuilding process.

We tried to get to Belmar to see the damage there but the area by the beach is only open to residents and it looked like they were still working on getting power back to parts of the town.

I can't imagine what Seaside looks like since that got hit a lot harder than Avon or Belmar. There is no doubt that this storm will leave scars across NJ for years to come.