Great Ideas!

During today's "Jose Ride" I heard some really great ideas for the club and thought I would post them here to remind me to follow up on them at a later date (when the club is solidified), so here goes - [Please feel free to add to the list]:

1) Offer to subsidize membership fees to young kids who cannot, or whose families cannot, afford to pay their kid’s fee into the bike club. (Dino)

2) Provide Penticton Search & Rescue with a copy of the digital GPS files I have for the book in order that they may use it to save some time (or lives), when assisting riders who are injured in the forest. (Lisa)

3) "Club clean-up days" to remove the sickening eye-sores such as that which currently exists at the Campbell Mt. 'Parking Lot' area on the north side (Chris)

Andrew D.

Spoke with the Penticton Ambulance Service today in Starbucks as four of them were sitting down for a coffee. They were 'stoked' with the idea of having digital mapping of our single-track trail system, and related to me how time-saving it would be to have on hand. As it turns out, they use GPS as well and can use my Garmin .GPX files strait off the top. Which brings me to my next point; if any of you have GPS tracks for the 3 Blind Mice area - please contact me! I wish to add whatever I can get my hands on to my current GPS lines and share them with rescue services way before the book is published.

I've been in 3.B.M. a lot, but am still missing routes which I know exist in the area. I've compared what I have to Bill Waldie's work and realized that his hand-drawn map is out of date and inaccurate. As such, I would like to complete the 3 Blind Mice GPS work and release it to both the Ambulance Service as well as Search & Rescue ASAP. It’s a big area and easily the most heavily trafficked trail network in our part of the valley. Again - if you have GPS tracks, don't be shy with them - I fully realize that some folks are on this weird "don't show anyone the trails" kick; but hey, if it were you laying out there with a critical injury - you'd want your rescuers to have a damned good idea where you were laying sprawled wouldn't cha'...

Among the ambulance drivers I spoke with today, one of them was a fellow who responded to Terry's recent accident; he related the great difficulties they had trying to locate Terry in the forest. As riders, we take it for granted that we more or less know the lay of the land up there, but ‘regular’ folks don’t have a clue – and, as it turns out – that includes all of the various medical services in our community.

A lot of very valuable time was wasted locating Terry that didn't need to be - lets help the folks who’s job it is to help us when we really need it by providing them with a fully detailed, accurate and up to date map of the area as soon as possible!

Andrew D.