Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Spooky RP ride

1830, Wednesday night, Halloween nite, PyZahl meet with K & C at the north east RP parking lot for a nite ride. The three fearless riders headed into the dark woods of RP/RCA areal and merged onto the winding trail -- into the deep dark forest. Little confusion at the intersection of the first black diamond section, looked so different in the dark, but they figured it out right and from them PyZahl led the group all the way and lighted up the trail with his dual TripeFire (TF) LED Light setup -- at max it out put 12 Watts bright LED light each:

Just a bit about Py's LED lights:

One Triple LED (4W max ea) light with 12/12/30 Degree Optics on the handlebar for fast far vision and the second TF with 30/12/30 Degree Optics on the helmet for perfect trail illumination... A total of 24W LED light, about 6x 80..90lm -- have to say Py's TF was designed and build in 2004 by himself and CF, so LEDs are a few generations old -- with today most state of the art LEDs you could get up to 100 lm/W -- that would be 2400 lm at 24W -- hard to imagine, need to see some time!!
However, even so, it is still more and better than most on the market, also his feather light LiPoly Battery, which lasts for over 4 1/2 hours at full power -- much longer if the light is just turned down a bit, he can adjust it continuously from off to 100%.

Just little into the ride we saw a light of some rider in the woods, not sure if ahead or behind. He seamed to hammer and joined us for the ride, as he missed buddies today, and was happy to hang on -- so four rider kept going. We moved good and at comfortable safe pace for Py. It was just a great warm Halloween nite -- and a little spooky also, as there was a bat(man) flying along... and crossing Py's light beams. Little later, a drink stop, and warm enough to take off one layer.

Flying over the Rocky Pt Trail @ nite really rocks!!!!! Not to mention flying at full warp scary speed through the two fast narrow tunnel like sections with lights -- Py was leading, it must look and feel even greater sitting at the end of the "MTB pace line"...

Passing the main parking lot the fourth rider left them and the three dived into the West Side.

Here PyZ is looking and pointing his helmet light on his buddies, K just fixed some minor technical trouble.... (no speedlight used!)


Here the speed light of the camera was enabled in addition:


C's new light turned into emergency mode, as the battery was not fully charged... so he got in the middle position to get light from the other two... Worked out pretty good, as we kept going still at a good pace, little more care full going. They finished the whole thing with a moving time of 1h47.

What a ride :-) and a perfect last time in there for the season, as this trail is closed from November for bikes.

2 comments:

  1. Don't you keep crashing into trees in such low light..?!?

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  2. Hey did not crashed into any tree but there are many trees with potential to crash into ;-) Just looked down here.

    PS: I finished the whole story now.

    ReplyDelete