Smartphones and Mountain Biking
Sean | July 22, 2010My roommate Brian and I have been mountain biking around Simi Valley. People in San Fernando Valley and L.A. often ask “why did you move all the way out there?” Well, it’s less crowded, cheaper, we have a killer view from out balcony, and there’s about a million miles of off-road mountain biking trails out here.
Wanting a GPS logger, I installed an app called MyTracks on my Android phone… It works a lot like those handheld GPS units made for hiking. You turn on the GPS, start recording and forget about it until you’re done. Then you can export directly from your phone to google maps.
You also get stats, and a graphs of speed and elevation versus time. The speed graph is on the phone only, but the elevation graph appears on the map if you click the pin for the end of the trail.
The stats look like this…
Total Distance: 16.99 km (10.6 mi)
Total Time: 3:02:47
Moving Time: 2:04:52
Average Speed: 5.61 km/h (3.5 mi/h)
Average Moving Speed: 8.16 km/h (5.1 mi/h)
Max Speed: 32.22 km/h (20.0 mi/h)
Min Elevation: 274 m (899 ft)
Max Elevation: 636 m (2087 ft)
Elevation Gain: 444 m (1457 ft)
Max Grade: 23 %
Min Grade: -15 %
Recorded: Tue Jul 20 17:19:00 PDT 2010
Activity type: mountain biking
We were slow because the trail was very sandy on the North part of the loop, so we basically walked our bikes up the hill and rode them back down. It’s probably better to just go up the South loop an turn around for the downhill fun. We’re also investigating starting the south loop, but taking the trail (middle range fire road) further… it runs into the Big Sky Movie Ranch – where they’ve filmed everything from ‘Little House on the Prairie’, ‘Bonanza’, and ‘Gunsmoke’ to ‘Coming to America’ and ‘Transformers’.
We’ve ridden to the ranch before and discussed signing liability waivers with the owner so we can bike on his land. He’s already shown us where a mountain lion den is, and warned us about the horns on his cattle… Mostly, he’s worried about teenagers going up there to get stoned, tag the movie sets, and possibly start brushfires.
