I’ve finally gotten around to working on the video footage from my return ride at Fort Custer near Battle Creek, MI. Hooked up there with Dennis in 2004 for the start of our tour of mountain biking around Michigan. It was so cool, we met there again in July of 2005. This time Dennis brought his camper, a 30 foot trailer, and we camped for the weekend.

I shot 3 hours of dv tape on the helmet cams and some handheld. I had trouble in 2004 with the helmet cam fogging up. The bullet cam heats up when in use, and when mounted on a helmet, the cool air hitting the lens element during a ride caused condensation on the front of the camera. BulletCam was very helpful, especially since I was purchasing a second camera this year, and rather than fix the faulty camera, they just had me send it back, and sent me two new, upgraded ones. Sweet!

So we rode some with two cameras mounted on one helmet. I have a switch that strings through the hoops on my Camelbak that allows me to switch between the front and rear facing cameras during a ride, but to do that I have to take a hand off the bars and fiddle for the cable. Very tedious. So mostly I rode in back with the front facing camera, and Dennis rode in front of me with the rear facing camera. For variety we did a few rides where we stopped periodically at some interesting trail to shoot one or the other of us with the handheld.

And there’s plenty of interesting trail at Fort Custer. It’s a WWI training facility. If you remember your American history, WWI utilized trench warfare. So there are old trenches everywhere that the trails weave in and out of. It’s like riding a roller coaster through the forest. See my post about the ride.

Here are two new videos you can watch. They are progressive download Flash video files. Flash makes smaller video files, but they’re still video files, so they will take a bit of time to download.

Trenches 2005 video

Crazy Beaver