Mountain Biking

Stumbled across the Connecticut MTB community website - Crankfire - which is providing an online web-mapping service for MTB tracks. They also have a page about how they are using Google Earth. You can see a sample map here. It sounds as though they are wanting to branch outside of just Connecticut now - I wonder if they can handle Southern Hemisphere co-ordinates?

Interestingly, they are using a php mapping script called JJFMapper - which we might have to keep an eye on.

The first stage of a new regional park has been opened in Canterbury on the banks of the Waimak river. When fully completed in 2012, the park will cover around 11,000 hectares. The main activities supported will be mountain-biking and hiking, but I dare say a few geocaches may appear there in the not to distant future. At this stage, only 10km of MTB track is available.

Mountain Bike Images

A mountain bike (or road bike) can easily be adapted for general gps or geocaching use by fitting a gps receiver handlebar mount. There are commercial handlebar mounts by both gps manufacturers and third-party suppliers available for most of the common gps receivers used for geocaching, but these can be expensive as they are imported. A simple homemade mounting can be made by the average DIYer in an hour of two and can be attached easily to the handlebar by Velcro. An example of such a homemade mounting is pictured. This particular mounting made of perspex, Bisonboard and Velcro, fitting both a road bike and a mountain bike, has done many, many kilometres of service over varying surfaces with no problems.