Mountain Bike Photography: 10 Techniques for Beginners
The Basics: A Short Primer This article is meant to provide you with some quick tips on taking photos while on the trail. Certainly, volumes can be written about photography, covering topics such as shutter speed, lighting, color temperature, depth of field, etc. Most non-professional SLR cameras don’t allow much control over these anyway. Instead, …
Video: How To Fix Your MTB Gear Shifting
The Trail Doctor is IN, and he’s writing you a prescription for getting your bike’s gear shifting working again. Bad shifts can ruin a ride or even snap a chain, so knowing how to fix your shifting on the trail is essential. Delving into 30+ years of mountain bike experience – from shop mechanic to …
11 Drills for Holding a Line: Gain Confidence on Skinnies and Narrow, Exposed Terrain
The skill of riding straight–holding a line, as it’s commonly called–is one of the most fundamental mountain bike skills. It’s not just used for riding skinnies, like the length of logs, planks, and elevated boardwalks, but staying on your line through rock gardens or along a section of narrow singletrack where precision matters. But just like the …
Race Report: It Hurt Like Hell… And I Loved It!
I took part in my first XC race over the weekend: the 6th Round of the Ontario Cup at Mountainview in Midland. It nearly broke me, and I loved every lung-burning, testicle-crushing, breakfast-losing second of it! Right from the start line, even the speed of my fellow competitors in the lowest male division blew me …
5 Reasons Why You Should Give Mountain Biking a Try
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about all the reasons people give for not biking. But perhaps instead of giving you a list of reasons why they don’t bike, people just want to know why in the world you do. When people ask me that question, they’re asking for trouble because I …
Think You’re a Mountain Biking Expert? Think Again.
Picture this: You’re renting a mountain bike for a trip to Whistler or Park City and on the rental form, they ask you to rate your riding ability: beginner, intermediate, advanced, or expert. It turns out that plenty of people end up checking “expert,” despite the fact that most, if not all, the guys and …
Mountain Biking Basics: Trail Etiquette
We live on an increasingly crowded planet and trails, whether we hike or ride them, are a refuge from the daily grind. And while these wonderful strips of bare ground in our open spaces help us escape from civilization, it often seems like the rest of civilization is escaping on them at the same time, …
6 Reasons People Give for Not Biking… And How to Refute Them
If you’re an avid mountain biker, you’ve probably heard every excuse in the book from people about why they don’t mountain bike. “You should give mountain biking a try,” you say. People shake their heads and scoff. They look at you like you’re the nutty one for biking in the first place, and then they’ll …
How To: Basic Bike Maintenance for Beginners
In the last few years, bikes have evolved from a mere tool of recreation into a true investment. You no longer have to be a hardcore cyclist to fit the caricaturist joke that your bike is worth more than your car: high end mountain bikes are consistently topping the $10,000 range. Unfortunately, purchasing the bike …
9 Tips for Recovering from a Bike Wreck: It’s Mostly Mental
When I was in college I biked quite a bit. Mostly we used the logging roads all over our 28,000 acre campus at Berry College. On one of these rides, I got in a rut left by a logging truck. I was cruising downhill at a fast pace and hit the edge of the rut. …
Beti AllRide Women’s Mountain Bike Clinic: Part 2
Be sure to check out Part 1 of this feature. There are a whole host of reasons to take a mountain biking clinic. Heck, Greg Heil’s previous article, “why everyone should take mountain biking lessons”, is enough to convince even the most seasoned veterans amongst us to sign up. The primary reason for taking a lesson or …
Beti AllRide Women’s Mountain Bike Clinic: Part 1
Learning mountain bike skills at the Beti AllRide Clinic.
