Today, John Childs, David Maxfield and I road our Cokers on the Iron Horse Trail. This is a rails-to-trails path they are planning a ride on for the day between NAUCC and UNICON this July. I have photos from the trip taken sequentially from the start at Hyak to the finish at Olallie State Park here:
These are high resolution photos, each about 300k or so. They are untitled, just dated and numbered. John also took photos of the trip.
The trail was 16 to 17 miles long with a very slight downgrade all of the way. The entire trail was gravel with only a couple of spots where it was loose enough to make travel difficult. We rode slowly and stopped MANY times for photo-ops and for visiting with folks on funny, complex vehicles and made the trip in about 3.5 hours. There were only two uphill sections and they were not at all steep and only 100 to 200 feet long. The hardest part of the trail was a short, steep downhill at the end. The photos show three dashing unicyclists with the highest tech equipment, one of who is shamelessly displaying yet another Gilby tee-shirt. Also shown in the photos are samples of the breathtaking scenery on the way.
There is a tunnel that is about 2.5 miles long that starts about 0.25 miles from the trailhead. There is no light in the tunnel and it was pretty much like being in a refridgerator. I brought a hand flashlight (UK torch), the standard 2 D-cell variety that was TOTALLY AND ABSOLUTELY USELESS in the tunnel. The headlamp John brought was a Niterider and was adequate. The headlamp David brought he may describe to you and it was superb. It was a WAY cool ride in the tunnel.
The Cokers were the IDEAL vehicles for this trip. A 24" or larger wheel with a 2" or wider tire would be adequate for the terrain but not nearly as pleasant. Maybe John or David would disagree with this assessment. I would rather be on a Coker on this trail than a bicycle. Riding the big boys was pure joy. I am definitely looking forward to doing this trail again with a HUGE HERD of unicyclists.
Gearhead wrote:
> I am definitely looking forward to doing this trail
> again with a HUGE HERD of unicyclists.
After looking at those pictures, I almost wish I had been able to travel
7000 miles at a few hours’ notice to join you. My favourite is:
And I see you like to put unicycle.com stickers on your Cokers over there as
well.
I didn’t go on a Coker ride in the end, 3 of us went for a bike ride
instead. Jamie wanted to try out my recumbent - once he got the hang of it,
I had a job getting it back!
The Iron Horse Trail (aka John Wayne Pioneer Trail) is a real fun ride on the Coker. The tunnel is always a blast to ride through (as long as you have a good light). After David and Greg headed back home I went up and rode through the tunnel two more times. I’ll have to recheck the topo maps and my GPS, but I believe the trail looses a little over 1000 feet of elevation over the 17 miles that we rode. The grade is very gradual and very constant (it is, after all, an old rail road grade).
I’ll be posting more info about the trail, including maps, as part of the “fun” rides planned during NAUCC/UNICON. The current plan is to do the Iron Horse ride on the first day of UNICON.
This was the first time that I had done the Iron Horse ride with a shuttle. Every other time I’ve ridden the trail I’ve done it by myself as an out and back trip. A shuttle ride is much more fun and you get to cover more of the trail.
I’m going to have to remember to put on sun screen next time.
FYI An easy way to download the pics from Greg’s page at <http://staff.washington.edu/gharper/IronHorse/> is to have Internet Explorer make that page available offline. This will download everything in one operation instead of manually clicking on eacy link and manually saving each picture.
Add the link to your Favorites
Right click on the new link in the Favorites list and select “Make available offline”.
Go through the Wizard to set up the settings to download the pages. For this link you will want to download links one level deep.
Select Tools -> Synchronize to start the batch download.
When it is done just copy the jpg files out of the Internet Explorer cache.
This works with lots of the other gallery pages where you want to grab a lot of pics.
> FYI An easy way to download the pics from Greg’s page at
> <http://staff.washington.edu/gharper/IronHorse/> is to have Internet
> Explorer make that page available offline. This will download
Your timing is perfect. I downloaded them all at work so I could pick out a
few for possible inclusion in the next On One Wheel. But I forgot to bring
them home and I’m trying to finish the issue tonight. You just saved me a
long, tedious dialup-hassle!
Greg has posted the thumbnails of the pics I took. The full size pics are about 1.8MB each and I’ve been too lazy to recompress them to a smaller size. They are pretty much the same shots that Greg got, just at a higher resolution. If you see a pic that you really want in the thumbnails Greg or I can email the full size pic or figure out some way of posting the full pic somewhere.
I’ll have to work on getting pics of people actually riding instead of just standing around holding a unicycle.
The tunnel is closed and locked during the Winter because ice forms on the roof of the tunnel and I believe that they are worried that ice chunks might fall on people. The tunnel is open from May through October.
John brought over a CD-R with his photos on them. He has a 4 Mpixel camera. The CD had 100MB on it. We had no website where we could put it all. Neither one of us wanted to resample to a smaller size.
Greg, I sent you an email yesterday, but realized it probably went nowhere
due to the security features of the forums. I hope you will see this today
and respond.
Can I use one or two of your Iron Horse shots (with credit) in the next On
One Wheel? It’s being finished today, so I need to know today. They will go
along with a short piece on how this is a planned ride, with more
information about the conventions. Then we will do our best to get the issue
out to members before they leave for the conventions.
I can’t wait to do the ride. Though there will surely be a bunch of Cokers
there, the vast majority of riders will probably be on 24" and 26" wheels,
because that’s what they have. I hope the foreign groups, who will probably
be in town already, will have a chance to find out about these rides…
Thanks for posting the pictures!
Thanks,
John Foss
President, Unicycling Society of America
President, International Unicycling Federation jfoss@unicycling.com
Take them, use them, give yourself credit if you want. It makes it worth taking a camera along and stopping frequently to take cool shots if someone else can benefit from them. John, David, and I wanted to make sure that out of town riders could preview the kind of trail rides they would get to go on here.
> John brought over a CD-R with his photos on them. He has a 4 Mpixel
> camera. The CD had 100MB on it. We had no website where we
> could put it
> all. Neither one of us wanted to resample to a smaller size.
You know, you guys could edit the pictures first, cutting the number of
really interesting shots probably in half
Then you could set up a little batch process in Photoshop (if you want to
spend the time) to make little 100 pixel wide thumbnails. Then just dump all
the thumbnails onto a blank HTML page, and link each to the larger
version…
I know, it takes time. That’s why I use Ofoto. My Web site is so out of
date…
To add to what John just said, both Photoshop and Dreamweaver will do automated web photo galleries. You can also use this as a way of automatically resizing several graphics at once.
Photoshop:
File>Automate>Web Photo Gallery
This automatically creates thumbnails and resized images appropriate for a web gallery. It also creates the web pages of the gallery. Photoshop doesn’t give you control over how big your thumbnails or resized pictures are.
Dreamwever:
Commands>Create Web Photo Gallery
This also creates thumbnails, resized pictures, and the web pages. The great thing is, you have more control. You can specify the size of the thumbnails and the resized images. This would be a great easy way of automating the resizing of several images.
