B-rad and I are starting to run low on time to finish mapping the HuRT. We only have two sections left to finish but it’s a sneaky race and has arrived rather quickly. With recent rainy weather and my bung knee, there hasn’t been any mapping done in the last few weeks. On the long drive home from Canberra after the Scott, amongst many metaphysical discussions, we came up with a solution…….. put a GPS tracker on AK.
He’s bound to ride some unreal trail (since that is his middle name) and he might as well be mapping for us while he is doing it. We gave him some broad directions like “Start at this set of powerlines and ride some cool stuff and end up in Wallsend”. He just grinned and nodded. You could already see the cogs ticking over in his mind calculating the exact route he would follow and measuring the amount of HuRT he could dish out in that space of time. Rest assured that his route through Killingworth will be simultaneously the greatest and worst moment of your life.
B-rad and I will be riding from the Pines to Becks Rd after the club round this sunday. This is going to feature a few additional sections like Rock Lobster and Keiths. Keiths is one of those love hate tracks. It is amazingly techy and tight single track and with fresh legs on, its a whole world of fun and laughter. In the middle of the night with 220k’s in the legs, it is going to rip your heart out and feed it to the leeches. I’m preparing to be a blubbering mess when I have to ride this in the dark all cold and alone.
I also started playing with topofusion which looks like a really neat tool that lets me edit the trail in all manner of nifty views and schtuff. I’ll be needing to spend some time with it this afternoon in order to correlate some distance measurements to go with the cue sheets. Hopefully the cue sheets and the final GPS trail will be available in a little over a week so people can start checking out likely bivvy spots on google earth. Hint: You can’t beat Barraba Trig – Best campsite ever.
PS: I’m well aquatinted with hyperbole so don’t take my dire warnings about the life and death struggle this trail represents too seriously…………. Leeches can’t eat your heart……… if your riding fast enough.
PPS: I set up another blog site for the HuRT to make the info a little easier to digest. Check it out here if you haven’t already.
the unknown rider 
I felt sure that when you said “Keiths” you were going to describe a sandbox trail.
I might try and ride HuRT over a 12 month period. The way I’m falling apart, 300km’s in a 12 month period could be pushing it, but I’m up for it.
aquatinted? is that post processing speak
http://damnyouautocorrect.com/
You should have mapped it on OpenStreetMap (OSM). You can then get directions and distances on Cloudmade Maps, and there is a OSM overlay that lets you overlay the OSM map onto Google earth so you can view it in 3D. Additionally you can download the OSM map or OpenMTB map into your Garmin GPS. Topofusion is too cluncky and limited.
I’ll have a play tonight. sounds good