Mountain biker dies from trail fall in Riverside County

Sad news from the Inland Empire, as a mountain bike rider has been found dead following a fall on a Riverside County trail.

According to the Idyllwild Town Crier, the body of 57-year old Pinyon resident James Thomas was discovered on nearby trail around 8 pm Sunday.

He had been riding downhill on a dirt trail two-tenths of a mile southwest of California 74 and Pinon Flats Transfer Station Road around 1:55 pm, when he apparently lost control after hitting a rocky patch.

Thomas suffered significant head injuries, despite wearing a helmet. He was found by a hiker about six hours later.

The story does not report how the authorities can be so specific in pinpointing the time of the crash.

This should serve as a tragic reminder to always tell someone where you’re going, and give them a time when you’ll be back.

This is the 68th bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the eighth in Riverside County. He is the second SoCal trail rider to be killed in a solo fall since the first of the year.

My deepest sympathy and prayers for James Thomas and his family.

 

One comment

  1. cantalouped says:

    You make a good point about the estimated time of death. The journalist apparently takes the medical evidence out of context in translating “half a dozen hours or so” into a time with a minute hand’s mention. They really meant something more like “ten plus or minus four hours” so rounding down even to an hour is not disclosed adequately by the word “about”. Call me cynical to so suppose this the explanation be. THey should of said “earlier the same day by at least a few hours in death he dead predecease discovery” or whatever the word is used in obituaries as it sounds disrespectful here.

    I do though need to conclude a post just made on your last thread about driverless car’s and since posting it discovered this apparently not multivehicle at least catastrophe. We should not blame the rider at all yet as equipment failures do kill us perhaps far more often then those in car’s and that remains my point.

    We as a community already surrender the right to ride just anything when we join organized rides. Generally we are required to have working brakes, I would assume any fixie rides are not insurable if even they don’t in writing at least demand that of participants.

    Yet we allow people to operate the cars we permit to share the roads with us in the swankiest locations.

    Cars without catalytic convertors. Cars still on sale newly manufactured are legal to operate yards away from homes proven to have high absentee rates in school for asthma etc being caught from so being driven past or at all near.

    Most of our fatalites are due to this bit of rough in every patch. THose of us who want to ban high tech bicycles from restricted paths are really advocating for low or no tech car’s remaining ‘viable’ at the loss of our children, spouses, selves.

    We in fact tend to die at our own hands like Mr. Thomas is reported to have because we so share our roads with monstrously insane contraptions unfit for use anywhere on the planet.

    IN what I wrote and shared with your site moments ago I noted when we board bus’s close enough to port’s the tanks are very cold, but not all that strong. Not much carbon fiber is invested in, rather a lot more carbon is emitted out the tailpipe.

    These are our choices. We elect people who spend our money fracking, and in turn melting the ice bergs, instead of spending less on smaller tanks, or supercapacitor’s even, so the engine can be ancient, and essentially like with cheese, bury us if not it, supporting prices lest fracking by any means be a waste of even vultures capital.

    It is a fact that when you spend ‘willingly’ nearly a million dollars nearly on a bus routinely that wastes most of the energy used by not recovering any inertial energy despite stopping many many times as many times for it being shared then smaller vehicles do (this alone is indefensible and a artifact of a time when operating them required mainly one own a reliable watch!) nobody will bother to build one that recovers that energy to push off the earth immediately. It is very important that we understand most of the energy a bus needs is needing to be stored for seconds, over and over again. That adds up. So it is not because CNG tanks are too expensive that they are not found in energy recovering coaches, it is in spite of that! If such tanks where expensive enough to build, and already to just fill you use twice as much energy as if they where not so small for the amount of gas contained (hydrogen is now nearly liquified but not by chilling, just by five figures worth of pounding per inch! when it burns it generates probably no more then gasoline does- dozens of pounds- yes less then we pump in by hand to our tires! That is why we buy gasoline- to push 90 pounds per inch- no more!), ahem, if such tanks actually cost a lot to make, then the industry would not install them and waste MOST of the contents. Yet this is the present rule without exception!

    YOu can see some cars sold on publicsurplus.com that demonstrate needlessly that the same half or so in gallons or whatever is saved in a car that bares stops and goes, by by using CNG/methan/hydrogen or oxygen …whatever, and burning it. When we use fuel cells we do recover the braking energy because the cells make so little power that batteries are needed to accelerate. And because they and them both are costly, and the same copper windings can be used to generate electricity as to move the wheels, energy is conserved, less heat is generated.

    ]
    But we are the customer. And we have not asked anyone to waste most of the fuel even if it ends up costing us so dearly. Air, lives, durability….

    We suck. We regulate, absurdly. Hummer’s are subject to the same standards as anyting but a bicycle in fact. TEchnically we see bicycles burning oil and it as ‘as if’ that occurs so battery powered one’s can be criminalised. THe meth heads goto ace hardward and drop a hundred bucks, mix the oil into the gasoline themselves, and instead of human powered bicycles no longer being street legal, if exclusively that, we now have a state law that says the best bicycle companies most modern and coveted by all of us truth be told models are illegal everywhere, and the value models can be banned where there presence is most needed.

    The roads tend to be public, yet they are operated for corporatiosn who know that by denying us quality we will waste money a tiny pittance they can claim as there profit.

    This is why a beach front nearly house in New Jersey costs a years rent of a studio in DTLA. Why a casino owner has gumption to believe he can do better then a ready for it’s next bankruptcy no thanks to us GM.

    Why America was asleep when Henry Ford was born, and has yet to be woken up by towns who Hitler literally built as housing for Volvo.

    In San Francisco the highest technology every used for mobility is still employed- if as it a tourist attraction and as I write this I realize it might just be being simulated. Gravity. Let those ‘pedalling’ downhill spare there brake pad’s and instead pull those needing ‘potential’ energy, thinner oxygen.

    One back then could unambigouslly of course call it “cable technology”. Like Golden Gate bridge science. Strong cords- with electricy having one role, reducing the amount of cable and pullies, so evaporated water on it’s way downhill after condensing can be plumbed to the roads via electrons through solid metal.

    A miracle rarely seen. ENergy that can move though solids. For too many of this it seems unbelievable.

    I saw the driverless car essay when I was checking on other technologies being available for purchase by any of us in quanties we need, no more. There where real surprises there today. Mind boggling.

    Soon it seems we will be able to scoot around not by attaching leaf blowers to our rear fenders but photon emitters. Pointed at the ground LED’s in a decade or so will put out so much light it won’t matter which way the wind is blowing, noislessly we will spin the earth under us any direction we shine it. (ten bucks gets you about five thousand lumens worth NOW (well seven weeks to delivery it says)) (two dollars per ‘kilo-lumen’ is the price to beat (as cyclists we tend to think light is thousands of times more expensive then that to generate efficiently- it has not been for a long time)

    For decades the industry has made famous those who destroy there profits forcing them to install fabric belts on the seats. Transit bus’s lack belts still. YEt we pay tens of thouands of dollars per seat during our lives just for the vehicle. Before fuel. DRiver. ETc!

    Or those of us not evil enough to entirely abstain. As if being car buyer’s is to be less shafted. Perhaps it is slightly less.

    A federal undercover agent has recently gone hollywood courtesy of bad guys largely volunteering to perform on camera. He is proud of a scene with a colleague getting hit in the head with a hammer. Those who took Ghandi’s advice to do that are rightfully proud. This man is shrill about how he is not able to claim he got so hit himself, not just that he was all but a bad guy day in and out.

    WE have things to righteously abstain from. Those include living in places where the lives of even children matter so little that it is all important they be allowed to wear expensive cars even if it means the great hoax they are needed to drive them persists another month.

    In flint michigan the wrath of evil leaves wonderful condition homes unbought if not sold for at most a few thousand dollars. Literally hundreds of dollars a bedroom to buy them for cash- needing no work. To count the places where people are more progressive does not require a third hand. It is only tenth on that list. Yet there are no takers for it’s homes to speak of.

    This is because they are not advertised beyond hudhomestore.com

    REdfin.com will not show you them.

    Realtor.com does.

    The governor has taken that city over twice. The aclu just proved under state control it was forcing people to put toxic waste into teh sewer, and the children brains are irrepairably damaged by the state ignoring people where drinking leaded water bought for over a hundred a month as well, making there blood almost illegal to flush not just the toilet if with municipal water.

    So Detroit has another customer, literally, for its’ river.

    And our souls if only feared burning forever.

    It is easy to be caught up in the hype. To wait until we are asked to literally stone our boys to death instead of just trick them into buying cars we have salvaged the air bags out of secretly. Such was Spielbergs script. Showing walking talking, dam right Jodah wise teddy bears as antique’s while people drive, steer for themselves, jalopies with sexy asses but no cpu apparently beyond our distracted meat.

    It maybe too late folks. The piston one, homo sapiens lost.

    I am a dead ender and will never accept that. IF we can hope for the first battle against madness being one we can overcome and this decade even enjoy first Peace- tools that acknowlede customer’s exist, be Kings in a country that has always had that as a promise even if for half it’s reign just as a gimmick.

    Make it so.

    Require cars be expensive enough to be bargains or able to have people design them with pride.

    Things feel better then to be to lied. I promise they exist.

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