The Cement Mountain Trail starts from the summit of 12,201′ Cement Mountain. While the trail is difficult to follow at first, once it’s found the trail is quite distinct- almost a doubletrack by the bottom, in fact. I rode this trail for the first time a few years ago and thought it was OK- but for whatever reason I really liked this trail a lot this time around. If nothing else, how many rides start at the summit of a 12,000′ peak? I’ve hike-a-biked to the summit from the highpoint of the Julie Andrews trail as well as the top of the Roaring Judy trail- either way it’s a long hike. This summer may be the last to legally ride this trail, as the new Forest Service Management Plan will “decommission” this trail soon. So if you’re looking for something new, check it out soon!

Pete Sowar:

Views from the top:

And the video:

12,201′ from 14erskiers on Vimeo.

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The final video from our ride of “XX”, Bear Creek, and finally, Deadman’s. Deadman’s is well known for its switchbacks, so rather than edit the video too much, I left it whole so inquiring minds who want to know can count the switchbacks. So get out your pencils, enjoy Modest Mouse, and start counting. Because this inquiring mind wants to know just how many switchbacks Deadman’s has…

Deadman’s Trail from 14erskiers on Vimeo.

Continued from the “Trail That Needs a Name” post, here’s a Bear Creek video TR, always one of my favorites in the area. Bear is just so fast and flowy…

Bear Creek 8.7.10 from 14erskiers on Vimeo.

I’ve taken to calling this trail XX. Others call it Double Diamond, as that is how the Latitude 40 map has it marked. Geographically, i suppose it could be called Upper Spring Creek. Maybe it just needs a number, a la 401. In any case, this trail can easily replace Flag Creek on the famous Reno-Flag-Bear-Deadman’s ride, making for a longer, but in my opinion better, ride. Brittany’s TR can be found HERE. I finally edited my video, check it out here. Video comes complete with a quality end-o, enjoy!

The Trail That Needs a Name from 14erskiers on Vimeo.

Recently, 14erskiers acquired a new toy to play with and hopefully add to the quality of our trip reports:
A GoPro HD helmet camera.

Having seen footage from other users of this camera, we felt that the wide angle that this camera captures offers the best POV footage. I have another helmet cam, but more often than not I found that the battery was dead, or my video camera batteries were dead, or one of the many cables weren’t attached perfectly. In fact, the only really good footage I ever got with that camera was from Pyramid’s Landry line. One of my goals this summer is to edit up that footage and get it on the site, so stay tuned for that.

We found Microsoft’s Moviemaker to be incredibly awkward, so we ended up using a trial version of Cyberlink PowerDirector. It’s pretty good, and we may end up buying it for about $70. We would love to hear from our readers about other good, inexpensive editing software options. Our other question is what format people save their videos in, so the quality remains high but it doesn’t take hours to upload. We also noticed that our video lost considerable quality when uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube. We weren’t sure if this had to do with the compression format we used (wmv) or something else. So, any tips you could offer us regarding maintaining video quality while uploading to sites like this would be much appreciated.

Being just a small, stand-alone unit, the GoPro offers up a lot of unique mounting scenarios, and I decided to give a top-tube mount on my mountain bike a try. I’m not sure if it will be my go-to bike mount, but I thought it was kind of fun and different. We need to get a better SD card, so for now we just shot in regular, rather than HD, mode. The best version can be viewed here: Download Video

Otherwise, here’s the Vimeo version. Brittany gets the credit for the excellent editing job- I started freaking out after trying to use MovieMaker and had to take a time-out. “Easy”, by Lucy’s Fur Coat came up on my mp3 player when I rode Strand, and the size was right, so that’s the song we went with. Long-time MSP movie fans might recognize the song from the closing shots in their second movie, “The Hedonist”, one of my favorites. Oh, and it was only my second ride of the year…

Strand Hill June 10, 2010 from 14erskiers on Vimeo.