 |
| What's New | Links | FAQ | Contact |
Links
MTBR
It's probably superfluous for me to include a link here to this site. If you're enough into mountain biking to find my website, you probably know enough about MTBR. It features what I believe to be the definitive mountain biking forum on the Internet; if it's not, as a whole, the most definitive online resource on mountain biking. A huge selection of trail and product reviews by users is also available. And the classifieds section here must be one of the most active anywhere for mountain biking paraphernalia.
DSKendall.com
Very good descriptions of mountain bike rides in the Los Angeles and, especially, the San Francisco area. Each ride description is accompanied by a good trail map and relevant links. The mountain biking information on the site doesn't seem to have been updated in recent years, but it still captures most of the highlights of mountain biking in the Bay Area. A personal top-10 ride list featured on the site is informative for beginners (to riding or to the area).
Mountain Bike Bill
A very rich source of ride descriptions throughout the western United States, and even a handful that are outside the US. Most descriptions are rich with photos, and in some cases even videos. The ride selection featured here for the Bay Area is unfortunately pretty slim, though.
Mountain Biking in the San Francisco Bay Area (MTB.LIVE555.COM)
A very wide range of mountain biking resources for a wide range of geographical regions (not limited to the US). The link above is to the page specific to the Bay Area. The ride description selection is very rich, too.
The Ogre's Guide
A staple in the bookmark list of any mountain biker in the western United States. Features a hand-picked list of rides with descriptions from the perspective of an experienced rider. Many ride descriptions features photos and maps, as well as links to other web pages about the same ride or trail, in some cases.
BikeCal.com
This site is a good resource if you're looking for a list of group rides that you can join. Their list of upcoming rides never seems to be empty. The site as a whole has more of a road riding emphasis, but this link will take you directly to their pages that are specific to mountain biking, which still has a lot of useful information.
The San Francisco Mountain Biking Page
A site that's rich in good first-hand descriptions of a very large number of local rides, as well as useful links, though the update log of the site shows that it hasn't had any significant updates since 2005 (and will not anymore).
PeteFagerlin.com
A well-designed website with content on a set of Northern California mountain bike rides. While the content for most of the rides consists of little more than photos, you might be hard-pressed to find as many good photos in one place anywhere else on the Internet about these riding locations.
Steve's Mountain Bike Page
A site that's rich in ride descriptions, although it's structured more like a personal ride log (with repeated rides in some locations) rather than a ride directory (where each ride is described only once). There are plenty of map links available. Also features some GPS resources and information on using GPS while/for riding.
Garmin Connect
This is Garmin's new(er) website for logging the GPS data of your outdoor sporting activities online. It's the successor to MotionBased. (See below.) What makes sites like this useful is the capability to do searches through all the activities of all the users of the site in order find GPS tracks for a particular trail or route in a particular area, of course. You don't have to be a member to search through other users' GPS tracks or to download them. The user interface of the site has a clean design and it's quite responsive. It represents a huge improvement over MotionBased in terms of usability, though it doesn't reach the expressive level of MTBGUru, below, in the combined representation of multiple activity tracks, as far as I've been able to figure out.
MotionBased
This was probably the first "GPS activity logging" site that achieved the critical mass of content amount to become truly useful. Garmin acquired the website a while ago and has recently phased it out in favor of Garmin Connect. Still, all the activity data originally uploaded to MotionBased still appears to be searchable here, although a warning message states that new uploads are no longer allowed. The search feature is a little slow and clunky and its user interface a bit outdated, but it still might get the job done due to the huge amount of content still available here. (I'm not sure that all of the activities here have necessarily been migrated to the Garmin Connect site.)
MTBGuru
Another "GPS activity log" website. Very rich in content. On top of all the basics of this kind of website that this one also gets right, MTBGuru features a unique characteristic that's very cool: In the map display on the very first page you see when you load the site, the routes of (seemingly) all the activities uploaded to the entire site are composited onto the map! This makes the map a very cool "heat map" of all the activities. You can see where everyone (at least everyone who is an active uploader to this site) is mostly riding, not only in your own local area, but pretty much anywhere in the world. While not all the activities represented are necessarily mountain bike rides, it still seems to be enough to reflect all the popular riding destinations successfully. This is very handy for noticing "hot spots" of rides that might have slipped your attention in your own local area until now, or for getting a quick overview of where the most popular rides are in an unfamiliar area to which you might be moving or have the chance of spending some temporary time. Or, just for browsing around to get a sense for where in the country or in the world most mountain biking might be taking place. Highly recommended!
Wind In My Face
This is a very active personal blog. You'll find a mix of ride reports, very good photography, and reviews and opinions on very sexy bikes and gear. (The author also maintains websites on photography and Mac computing, so if you're into any of those topics, you don't want to miss those either.)
Singletracks Mountain Bike Blog
This professional blog connected to the Singletracks website features frequent mountain bike and equipment reviews, event coverage, technical articles about biking and more generalized biking-related opinion pieces, as well as some how-to articles once in a while.
Bay Bikers
This one is the biking blog of The San Francisco Chronicle. It has more of an urban/road riding focus, actually. Still, due to the sheer scale of journalistic resources behind it and its coverage of wide-ranging biking issues related to our area (which also impact mountain bikers, frequently), you'd be missing out if you don't at least browse through this blog once in a while.
Passion Trail Bikes
More than just a bike shop, this is an important resource for mountain biking (at least) in the Peninsula. They organize weekly local rides as well as trail work. Their website is a good source of ride information for riding destinations in the shop's vicinity. This shop also features the widest selection of available demo bikes of any shop that I know of in this area.
2Pedal Mountain Biking
A good source for a wide selection of mountain biking maps and guidebooks for the whole nation, including plenty for California. Their California-specific page features a selection of web links as well.
24 Hour Bike Shop
Operators of vending machines stocked with emergency supplies and the essential needs of bikers. Any one of these could be a life-saver if you get in some riding trouble when the stores all closed. They have quite a few machines around the Bay Area strategically located around places popular with mountain bikers, too. You can check the site to see their current locations.