On Friday Steven and I did a nice Cross Country ride through the Citrus orchards north of the Israeli city of Ranana. The ride was not easy because most of the agricultural roads were covered in sand and the tires sunk from 3 to 5cm into the sand. We took a few breaks and ate fresh grapefruite right off the trees. The law in Israel allows you to eat produce in the fields. You are not allowed to take any with you but you can legaly eat as much as you want on site. This is law that was in effect since biblical times allowing poor peaple to avoid starvation. In the picture you can see Steven with a freshly picked grapefruit. The highlight of the trip was the climb and the ride down the garbage dump! The dump has not been used for a number of years and was covered in dirt and vegitation including olive trees at the top. Keep in mind that I only rode down one small section of this dump that we estimated to about 15 meters high with about a 60% slant to the slope! (For some reason video never does steepness justice! Look at the Youtube link.) The speed was awesome and I am going to work on doing longer stretches in the future. The rest of the way we went down the road that leads to the top.
Nice pictures. Interesting bit about being allowed to eat from the fruits, and this dating back from biblical times.
Incidentally, my usual MUni area is an old rubbish dump site too! It has been covered with a few metres of soil, and is now a nature area. Some fruits grow there (semi-wild) such as blackberries, and are not harvested commercially so I could eat them at the spot (which I often do) or even pick some and take them home.
You can’t stand at the bottom and point the camera up, (or top and down)you need to get halfway up the hill, keep your camera as level as possible, and back up enough so your camera can see the angle…maybe 30 feet back from him as he rides by. Try to get some reference points if you can (like trees point straight up (usually) kinda reference points)
Thanks for the filming tip. I will have to play around with it. The vid was actually filmed by a cellular phone so I could not expect that much.
Israel has a lot of mountains but the coastal plain where most of the population lives is very flat. However every city has an old garbage mound a couple of kilometers outside it’s city limits. These Garbage dumps have all been put out of use a few years ago and covered in dirt. Many of them have been turned into Nature Spots. This gives kids and people without cars easy access to great downhilling!
I can imagine how handy a man made garbage dump would be for you in Holland! It is very cool to go out and MUni in Nature and to be able to eat what it provides. I usually ride in the Jerusalem mountains. There are great singles there but the perfect steep slopes of these garbage dumps are too good to pass up on downhilling practice!
Israeli law is pretty interesting it is a combination of old Biblical law, Ottoman (Turkish), and British law and is now being influenced by precedence breaking court cases in America. I hope for our sake that we are incorporating the best of each! Also there is no law outlawing unicycles from the road!
I can imagine how handy a man made garbage dump would be for you in Holland! It is very cool to go out and MUni in Nature and to be able to eat what it provides. I usually ride in the Jerusalem mountains. There are great singles there but the perfect steep slopes of these garbage dumps are too good to pass up on downhilling practice!
Israeli law is pretty interesting it is a combination of old Biblical law, Ottoman (Turkish), and British law and is now being influenced by precedence breaking court cases in America. I hope for our sake that we are incorporating the best of each! Also there is no law outlawing unicycles from the road!
I have yet to ride our famous junk-pile. The “longest steepest run in Saskatchewan” is on a giant pile of garbage built up back in the late 60s for the 1971 Canada Winter Games.
Unfortunately it is not going to open this year so I can’t use the chair lift (if they would let me) They even had it open for a few summers for mountain bikers but the new owners are having insurance problems.
There is another garbage enhanced hill near where my cousin used to live and we would go sliding down that, aren’t trash heaps fun?
Another thing making it look less steep is that the camera was slanted so it was somewhat parallel to the slope.
Yeah, standing back and showing something that’s usually virtical or flat (like a lake or the horizon) helps, but you can cheat and tilt the camera so the slope looks steeper (doesn’t really work if there are those refferences though).
UDC was giving away posters with some special order a year or two ago, and I got the poster. So I put the poster up on my office wall at work. Other engineers liked to point out that the trees aren’t straight, that the steepness of the rock face is exaggerated. Now I keep the poster tilted so the trees are growing straight.
