Rain delays

Day One of the MTB catalog photoshoot up here in Oregon started with all the best intentions. Despite a little rain last night, the morning greeted us with fairly clear conditions. After grabbing some coffee and sinfully good baked goods at Stumptown Roasters, we headed over to Aaron Lutze's house to pick up the trailer and head over to the Scappoose Trail to begin our day of shooting.

Aaron has been gracious enough to allow his house to be our trailer and bike storage area. The inside of his house literally looks like it's been taken over by bikes. They are everywhere...in his living room, in his basement...I'm really surprised I didn't find one in his bathroom.

Aaron's living room

After a brief meeting about our itinerary for the upcoming week, we got the trailer loaded and headed over to the trail head. Before we started shooting, we decided to take a scouting run down the trail so we could identify some areas on the trail we wanted to shoot on. New Haro flow rider Wilson shuttled us up to the top of Scappoose and dropped us off.

The shooting schedule

The top of the Scappoose Trail has the most unreal view of almost the entire city of Portland. From there, we dropped into some really beautiful singletrack. The trees were so dense, it made it as dark as dusk. Everything is so green and lush...so many pine trees, ferns, and moss everywhere. The trail itself was just as sweet as the scenery around it...despite the rain we had the night before, the trail wasn't too muddy. We identified a few areas we wanted to shoot as we headed down the trail, eager to get the camera equipment and come back up.

A little more than about halfway down the trail, the conditions changed. The flowy, tacky singletrack turned into a mucky mess that was slicker than snot. You know the conditions I'm talking about...the kind where your bike just seems to have a mind of its own. Needless to say, this really gummed up the bikes were were on (not to mention our bodies). We were thankful that the bikes we rode down on weren't the bikes we were shooting with; the bikes we were on were a complete disaster.

Pete's bike. I'm pretty sure we could have made an adobe brick out of the stuff clinging to our bikes!

After slipping and sliding down the rest of the trail, we finally reached the bottom. The weather was starting to turn ugly again. We rushed to gather the bikes we were going to shoot with, hoping we'd have a break in the weather. Then the rain started. And continued. Eric Porter grabbed his iPhone and showed us the satellite image of the storm. It sure didn't look good. The rain continued to fall.

We made the decision as a group to call off the shoot for the day since we didn't want to risk frying any of the camera equipment this early in the trip. We packed up all the muddy bikes and muddy bodies into the truck and headed back to Aaron's house to re-group.

Over dinner tonight, we decided that we're going to leave Portland in the morning and head over to Bend early in hopes of finding dryer trails. If it doesn't rain more tonight, we may go to a skatepark on the way out to shoot there for a little while.

That's a wrap on today's action. Somebody please make the rain gods go away...or at least go pick on somebody else for a little while!

The End. This is why we see so many people with fenders up here!