America’s top stage race, the Tour of California, kicked off on Sunday in Escondido, north of San Diego. It attracts some of the best pro cyclists in the world for eight days of racing, at least those who don’t want to risk running themselves down by riding the concurrent Giro d’ Italia for three weeks.  This year the race runs south to north, which is the wrong direction in California as the coast wind is relentless, usually blowing from the north.  Usually.

This July the Tour de France will again contest the slopes of Alpe d' Huez and, for the first time in history, climb it twice in the same day!  This will be made possible by climbing beyond the normal finish line up over the col du Sarenne then descending on an obscure road back into the valley of the Romanche River to do the climb again for the finish.  This will take place on Thursday, July 18, three days before the Tour finish in Paris, so it is sure to be decisive.

The 2013 Paris-Roubaix is shaping up to be an epic challenge for professional cyclists.  One of the oldest races, it is arguably the toughest and most prestigious one-day contest in cycling. 

Northern France is basically flat.  Paris-Roubaix’s difficulty comes from 21 sections on narrow cobblestone roads, the pave’, that come near the end of the race.

Trail Genius is working on applying our technology for ski resort maps, and what better place to collect some data then Winter Park, CO on a blue bird day.  Enjoy this quick edit of me dropping into one of the many Alphabet Chutes, this footage along with more is getting crunched as I type and will be in a new map to come.

Our first Nordic race mapping project was a success!  It all started with making a pre-race map for the Great Bear Chase Ski Marathon (GBC) organizers, and finished with the Trail Genius (TG) crew racing the event.

We could not have asked for better conditions for filming the pr-race map, it was cold but the sun was shinning and the trail crew took extra care to make sure the trails looked and skied great.  The plan was to ski and film the 25k course with two skiers from the GBC crew and Chris from Trail Genius.  One of the GBC crew used his striding gear for a short section at the beginning of the course, and then switched to his skate gear for the remainder of the course.  One of the trail grooming crew was kind enough to follow our every move in the snowmobile/groomer with one our our TG cameras, and Chris wore a backup camera on his head.  In the end the footage came out great, and the map we created is available on the TG site and embedded in the GBC race map page.

Our new fat bikes are here, and they are twins!  Two identical (accept for size) custom bikes from our boys over at Schlick Cycles.  You can get all specs over at Schlicks Blog.  We will be racing them this weekend, a map and video to come.

The TG crew just keeps getting love from the snow gods!  This time we got, special delivery, 20+ inches of snow in 12 hours, and with a ski hill right outside our front door, that was closed because of the blizzard, we had the place all to ourselves. Needless to say our cameras were rolling and we got some of the best turns and footage of our lives!

Here at Trail Genius we have taken a liking to the new Contour 2+ cameras, and we finally got some great snow to test them out in.  Here is a quick edit of some great ski footage we shot with our 2+ cameras, got to love the slow mow!

Lance Armstrong's reputation my be lower that a punctured sew up, but what about Pee Oui's?  Maybe you'll call him naive, stupid, gullible or just plain Pee Oui, but he swallowed the Lance denials hook, line and lager.  And why?  Read on.

Oprah:  Pee Oui, did you ever see Lance Armstrong use drugs?

Pee Oui:  No, not never, not ever.

Oprah:  Did you ever see him drink beer?

Pee Oui:  Yes, many times when he was shilling for that Missouri swill Michelob Light.