Survival mode

I’ve got a bunch of crap going on this week and, unfortunately, very little of it involves riding. So far. With all this warm weather, commuting conditions suck, and I’ve needed my car every day this week anyway. Hell, I even broke down last night and put the road bike on the trainer and spent about an hour spinning on the hamster wheel as a DVD played on the big-ass TV.

Which reminds me, in case I haven’t mentioned it lately: Riding a trainer sucks.

Wednesday night, come hell or high water, the fat bike’s back on singletrack. In the meantime, I’m trying to find time to figure out the sweet new camera that should boost the quality of photos on the ol’ blog, and I’m making plans for a very cool trip with Jules and the Monkee.

This week has sucked ass so far, but there’s good stuff ahead.

Speaking of good stuff, the week hasn't sucked for Jules, who scored a free Camelbak at Saturday night's Frigid Bits event, and then won 10 free stickers for proposing "No Waxing Required" for the new Bicycles & Icicles frame stickers.

The readers have spoken, and the stickers have been ordered.

Cold juice

When is someone going to develop a battery that won't turn to crap every time it gets good and cold? I mean, seriously, with all the technological improvements we've seen in winter riding over the past couple of years, I think batteries are one of the main pieces of gear that still need improvement.

Tonight's ride was in temps of about 4F ... from what I could tell. I had to hold my digital thermometer at just the right angle to get a reading off the LED screen as the battery faded.

The NightRider light on my handlebar did it's job for more than two hours, and was still working when we got back to the cars, but the power indicator turned red less than an hour into the ride, even though the battery was fully charged for a three-hour burn.

But my camera presents one of my main frustrations in temps below 20F. Despite numerous attempts, I got a grand total of one image from the trail tonight—the one you see on this post—and I didn't know if I had it until I got home. As soon as I took the shot, the battery wheezed under the load of saving the digital image and the screen on my camera went dark except for the "change battery pack" message.

After wrapping my hand around the camera (while still inside my pocket) for a couple of minutes, I managed to get a couple of shots in the parking lot at the end of the ride, but just barely.

Battery companies of the world, get your shit together and give us better products. Much of the world is cold this time of year, and not everyone sits inside catatonically staring at new episodes of "Lost" every night.

Is it really too much to ask for a battery that can function for a couple of hours at 0F?

Cameras on the trail

This image of my friend Adam shooting pictures last weekend got me thinking about how digital cameras have evolved into one of the most popular items carried on mountain bike rides. I’d rank mine right behind water, food, repair tool, pump and spare tube.

It didn’t used to be this way. Ten years ago, virtually none of my riding partners carried cameras, and I did so only occasionally. Good SLRs were (and still are) so heavy that carrying them was a pain in the ass, and so expensive that the idea of destroying one in a crash was worse than the thought of getting hurt. Point-and-shoot film cameras weren’t much lighter, and the quality of images they produced could be pretty marginal.

Today I carry a camera about the same size as a deck of cards. Its 2GB memory card isn’t much bigger than a corn flake, but holds something like 600 or 700 high-resolution images. I bought the whole damn setup for $200, which is less than I used to pay for enough film, processing and printing to get 600 snapshots.

Although it doesn’t allow me the full manual control of a digital SLR, my digital point-and-shoot gives me an amazing number of microchip-assisted frills that no film camera ever could. And it’s so light that I can attach it to the chest strap of a Camelbak and forget it’s there.

And maybe best of all, it’s cheap enough that if I smash it to pieces in a crash, I'll be a little bummed out, but I won’t lose any sleep over it. Every year, these little cameras get better and cheaper.

I wish we could say the same thing about suspension systems.