Mountain biking – Part II

The four-week class introducing kids to mountain biking culminated in a group outing to our county's only state park, 1,650 acres of rolling forest perched on the eastern margin of Oregon's Coastal Range. The trails there were not particularly formidable, but before the trek was over, it was clear that I'd put a lot more thought and preparation into my equipment than into the logistics of my coverage, much less my own conditioning.

If I had thought through the project like a producer instead of a newspaper photographer, I would have foreseen the value of scouting the trail ahead of time. The class instructor mentioned in our phone conversation the night before that he and a park ranger had ridden the trail that morning just to be sure it was suitable for the kids. I hadn't been invited along because I hadn't mentioned that such knowledge of the trail would help me plan my coverage – knowledge such as only the first mile of the five-mile trek would actually involve anything resembling a steep, rugged mountain trail. The other four miles of the trek would be spent on a smooth, asphalted path that was once a railroad bed.

For a slide show on mountain biking, I needed the mountain trail images, and not so much the smooth, nearly flat images of the fortest path.

What I also failed to impress upon the instructor was the necessity of my getting ahead of the group – frequently – in order to shoot them riding toward the camera and across the frame, rather than mostly away from the camera. To do this, I had to find a suitable site ahead of the group to stake out for photographing and audio recording as they rolled by, then get ahead of the group again and do the same thing. The instructor didn't seem to get this at all. Once they swept past the initial site of my coverage at the top of the mountain trail, the group only stopped once to rest during the initial one-mile descent. That gave me a chance to catch up, but I had to skip the breather they were taking and keep riding to find the next site of coverage.

This went on for the next four miles. I knew I didn't have enough images of kids riding on an actual mountain trail, but figured I'd have a second chance on the way back up – and the climbing shots would be even more crucial to the slide show than images of their breezy descent.

That descent was deceptively breezy. Retracing the gradual four-mile incline of smooth path back toward our starting point soon left me panting. It got much harder to catch up with the group as I fell further and further behind. I knew the group was scheduled to stop and rest at the base of the final one-mile stretch of mountain trail. I planned to confront the instructor there and convince him that unless he gave me a better chance of getting ahead of the group frequently enough on this last leg of the climb, I wouldn't have enough images for a slide show.

Imagine my disappointment to find no group of kids waiting at the base of the mountain trail. They had gone on without me. Instead, another adult was waiting to tell me that I could either chase them up the mountain trail or take the park road – a "short cut" – back to our starting point and try to head them off near the top of the trail. The road was probably only a half mile, I was told. I chose the road and began peddling hard to salvage the slide show.

The road back wasn't a half mile. It was 1.25 miles of steady incline that rose more than 400 feet, and I didn't really have a good understanding of how to work the 15 gears in order to cope with that. I finally reached our trailhead – gasping for air – only to see the last of the kids coming off the trail.

I had enough material to produce a full-page feature for the newspaper (finessing the fact that I didn't have any decent mountain trail shots), but I had missed the main point for a slide show about mountain biking!