Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Mountain Biking - Oneonta, NY

It's May 1st, so that means it's time for my completely arbitrary switch to summer mode for the blog.  Time to talk mountain biking.

In my quest to broaden my mountain biking horizons, I try to go to a few new places every year. Last year, I rode in a bunch of spots from Maine to Vermont to New York to Arizona.  I'm hoping to get a lot more new places this year.  First on the list is Oneonta, NY, close to Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame. The mtbr forums mentioned a lot of trail work being done in recent years in a spot near the Oneonta High School.  I really didn't know exactly where I was going because I couldn't find a map online.  Luckily, I made my own:


I'm sure that will be very helpful for everybody.  

The trails were pretty sweet, actually.  The guys at the Oneonta Mountain Bike Club have done a great job of getting the trails together.  They're flowy, with nice ups and downs, stream crossings, wall rollovers and wooden bridge features.  There's also a few jumps and banked turns to encourage some high speed stuff.  It rides like a mini version of Pine Hill Park without all that terrain.

I made a video of my ride, using the GoPro chest harness.  It creates a cool look, but when I was climbing and trying to apply some pressure to the front wheel, the camera just pointed straight down.  And when I was on a downhill out of the saddle, I was kind of bent over, so the camera just pointed straight down.  In fact, the only time you can see the trail in front of me is when I'm sitting and spinning on flat ground. I guess I'll have to go with a helmet mount when I do the Single Speed USA Race at Stowe in July.

Anyway, here's the video:




2 comments:

  1. I enjoyed the video, pretty neat...

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  2. Matt,

    Thanks for the sweet writeup. Being one of the guys who has done the most trail work in Oneonta over the past few years, it's great to see a positive review of our hard work here.

    A tip with the GoPro: detach the mount and case from the Chesty harness and flip upside down. This allows you to angle the camera up (about 45 degrees up when standing) so when you're bent over the bars the camera is filming out front.

    You barely scratched the surface of what's here in Oneonta, and we'd love to meet up with you if you made another trip into town. My name on the MTBR forums (where you found info about our trails) is sambs827. Get in touch with me on there and we could maybe set up a date for a big ride. We have ~30 miles of trail here to keep you busy. Cheers!

    Sam B-S

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