Albert

Yeah, that's what I usually ride to get down to the BCRT when I ride my bike from my house in east Round Rock. I can't see how that would be impacted at all.

I'm not sure exactly where these photos were taken, although I have an idea. I didn't realize where Wyoming Springs is, but I've written that a million times to get to the beginning of the BCRT. So they are extending the existing end of Wyoming Springs (where it meets Creek Bend) all the way up to Old Settlers? I had no idea, although I guess it's obvious that was going to happen at some point, given there's a stub for the road right there. I didn't know there was actually a trail there, I always would go a little west and take the trail that goes past the pool, or the concrete path that's a bit further west that dumps onto the BCRT.

No photos?

That's a great photo, but not sure what creek that is. Is it Bull Creek? I know there's a low-water crossing like in your previous photo over there (and I used to live right along Bull Creek, but that was over 15 years ago), but don't recall if that's the same low-water crossing.

Can't wait!!

This is for the new road going in?

Yeah, that would be interesting, the forum could just be another facet of a site that has all that information about Austin (and not-so-Austin) trails. I don't know how much John has been keeping his site up to date, probably would need some updates with trails that have opened, changed, and closed in recent times.

No shit!!!

Greetings, I hope everyone is doing well! I am looking for someone to take over this website, and in particular, the forum (which, right now, is the entirety of the website, since the forum is parked on the root of the domain). I am moving from Austin this month, after moving here initially in 1997. It's been a long time, and I've seen Austin grow immensely during the nearly 30 years I've been here! I've been looking for a change for a while, and we finally bought a house in another state in May, my better half has already been living there since July, and it's time for me to finally get the hell out of here (business kept me here a bit longer, and I'm wrapping that up and about to pack all of that up). I've had an awesome time mountain biking (and sometimes, riding on roads) in Austin over the years, and it's been amazing watching the mountain biking scene here explode during that time. As well as all the trails that have been built or expanded during my tenure here. I've met tons of great people, had fun building trails, and overall had a fantastic time riding the wide variety of trail systems we have within an hour's radius of Austin. Just recently I was given a tour of the (relatively) new Katy Trails and have had a lot of fun with those, and I know they will continue to be expanded over time. Definitely get out there if you haven't already. 🙂 Running the forum is pretty straightforward, especially once it's moved to another server and is running (something I'm glad to help with). I will transfer the austinmountainbiking.com domain as part of this process, at no charge. The site will need to be moved to another server, and it'll probably run fine on a VPS. Right now it's running on a dedicated server along with some other sites I host, but it's not a very resource intensive site, and it's also not huge. If the server logs are pruned (which I've never done), the site will be under a GB in size, including the database, which is only 100MB zipped. I am happy to help someone move the entire site and get it functional on another server, it just needs to be running PHP 8.x, along with MySQL (there will be specific PHP and Apache modules required as well, but that's generally not difficult to setup). A site with access to cPanel would be ideal, as I could easily transfer the site over with very little work involved. When I first set the site up (as an alternative to Bike MoJo at the time, which was being overrun with spam), I had planned to do a lot more with it, but my life just became super busy and I simply did not have time to dump into this site as I had originally planned. Someone else could take the site and market a bit, such as promoting it on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, etc., to attract more users. There's obviously a large biking community in Austin. 🙂 I have no plans on taking the site down immediately. However, if nobody is ultimately interested, I will eventually take it down, as I am trying to simplify things in my life, and running and maintaining dedicated servers and the websites sitting on them is definitely on that list. Please send me a PM here if you're interested, and we can talk. Thank you! ..Al

Damn.

I'm not sure, we definitely saw lots of flame at the bottom after it landed, almost looked like it was about to assplode, but the video cut off before that. That thing is REALLY tall, it would have been pretty obvious if it was falling over in the video, although I'll need to go watch it again (I've seen it multiple times already). Yeah, it was absolutely amazing that the ship made it all the way for a soft landing, and that the flap was STILL FUNCTIONING even with all that damage and losing a big chunk of it on the way down! Just astounding, I could not believe it. I was fully expecting the ship to just break up at any moment while it was being pummeled by that plasma! Well, they knew exactly where Super Heavy landed (there were two different camera shots in the new video they posted this morning), so SpaceX certainly knows what happened to it, and it's possible they tried to recover it, we just don't know. But my guess is it broke up or exploded once tipping over. I'm sure they would have loved to examine it, though, to see how it fared on reentry. Starship is more of a problem since it landed in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and I doubt its landing was nearly as precise for this iteration.

Yep! Just disappointed they didn't follow the external view all the way to the ocean, I would have loved to seen it sitting there in the water momentarily before it either fell over and/or blew the hell up. Which is what looked like it was beginning to do on the live stream after it "landed".

I know what this is going to be before I even look at the link. 😄

Here's the booster landing in the Indian Ocean:

That was amazing! I cannot believe Starship actually had a soft water landing after you could see one of the flaps burning up in real time and other stuff obviously burning. And the flap was still working, even though a big chunk of it was missing, just astounding. Watching stuff fly off the ship with plasma everywhere was just nuts. And the landing of the booster in the water was incredible, unbroken video all the way to splash down. And another good Raptor performance, only one motor was out at launch, but the other 33 remained stable, plus both relights (boost back burn and landing burn) worked as expected. It would have been amazing to see exterior footage of Starship coming back down, likely with parts of it on fire, but still relit the engines and landed upright, presumably (from the data coming back, looks like it hit fairly slowly, if the data was accurate). Now SpaceX has an enormous amount of video and data to pore over before IFT5! This video is crazy: https://x.com/krassenstein/status/1798715585896833295 Elon confirming it made a soft landing (which means it was landing under power and did the crazy flip maneuver right before firing up the engines):