Medicine Wheel

Short Version:
A great ride. We learn things.

Long Version:
Dragging ourselves out of bed wasn't easy, but was made much more palatable by the prospect of more illicit trail exploration. And we were rewarded once again by some fairly spectacular balloonrise action in the glorious morning sunshine.

We'd met Ogden* the Alaskan-Jewish Palinist Islamophile over delicous foods the night before, and set off on the bikes from his house late in the morning, in fine spirits and bound for parts unknown. Six hours later, we were back, eating delicious snacks and drinking beer in the hot tub. We figured we'd earned it, having hit slickrock and unslick rocks; soft sand and hard; water-sculpted stonescapes in the midst of the desert; derelict cabins; mesas and buttes; sidehills and steep rollovers and stacked ramps and spiky plants. For the second day in a row Nene nailed a steeply-sloping slickrock sidehill that took some of my skin when I failed to negotiate it appropriately, and for the second day in a row she rolled stuff that looked impassable, impressing the natives and scaring the few remaining bejeebers right out of me.

Picking highlights is a tough ask when the whole ride is that phenomenal, but it would be remiss of us to fail to mention at least a few things:
- The Medicine Wheel: The Doctor*, Renfrew* and Ogden were riding around and around this rock circle when I arrived. Each new arrival on the scene joined the carousel action, and once we were all present and accounted for we peeled off one by one. A seriously cool active way to regroup. And apparently we got luckier and younger each revolution we made, which is a pretty excellent bonus.
- The Steep Thing: It was steep.
- The Snooze: Most of us napped in the sun at the bottom of the steep thing while the Doctor and Ogden and Renfrew repaired trail damage back along the Mescal Mesa traverse. Someone had been performing trail sabotage since the folks last passed that way, and Renfrew's trail-blockage rock removals had become more and more vehement. We felt bad for not helping, but when it comes down to it we (I) would probably have been more hindrance than help. And snoozing in the sun was really, really nice.
- Darch Flies: Darch rides everything, almost always with aplomb, so hearing the tale of the tree-strike from the previous day was pretty special. Seeing him pitch over his handlebars on a minimal drop, with a tiny difficulty level was - once he'd picked himself up and proved he'd survived (relatively, and excepting dignity) unscathed - kind of cool.
- Felix*: Mrs Renfrew appeared about halfway around the Aerie Trail. She was riding solo as she wasn't feeling 100%, and that's borderline scary given how fast and how smooth she rode; not only named after a cat, but catlike in grace and power as well. Kind of like her husband, only with less beardness. And she had a shirt that said "Shit" on it.
- Ogden and the Prickly Pear: The stylish, graceful entirely intentional dismount that landed him on the spiky plant was impressive enough, but the several large chunks of bespined plant matter that then intertwined themselves with the frame of his bike made the whole episode just that little bit specialler.
- Xmas Wash: No, not the annual bathing escapade; rather, an occasional watercourse - dry now - that the hardcore (Ogden, Renfrew, The Doctor) and the stupid (me) rode instead of the fast flowing descent option taken by everyone with an ounce of sense. Right from the (steep, sketchy) get-go, this part of the ride shaped as trouble with a capital everything, and it didn't disappoint. I was inordinately pleased when the Doctor put a foot down, joining me in the Didn't Clear Xmas Wash (Today) Club. Of course, he still rode way more of the head-sized boulder-fields interspersed with evil soft sand than I managed, and we'll not go into how long Renfrew sat awaiting our arrival at the end of the Wash... It was seriously challenging, and bloody hard work, and ultimately really rewarding.

Special mention has to be made of the extreme man-love session partway through the Wash. And of the Lingerie Football League game that Ogden used as a teaching aid whilst instructing us in the joys of Amerikan Football. And politics. And Comparative Religion, the History of the Middle East, the Sociology and Geography of Alaska... This was our first opportunity to hear from the red side of Amerikan**, and we grabbed it with all of our ears.

By the time we left (late!), we were hammered, and learned, and pretty well worn out.







* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty

** = Those El Bizarro Amerikans have reversed the color scheme in use pretty much everywhere else, so areas controlled by or traditionally associated with their theoretically-left-leaning Democrat party are shaded blue on maps, while the more conservative Republikan party's domains are shaded red. This despite McCarthyism, Reds Under the Bed, all the antipathy towards the former Soviet Union and all their Communist allies, and the fact that they've had not just one Red Scare but two (The First, in 1919/1920 was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second ran from 1947 to 1957, and was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both)***

*** = Thanks, Wikipedia!

The Doctor Will See You Now

Short Version:
Right-wing agitators take us on a crime spree in and around Sedona

Long Version:
We were tetchy about the prospect of riding Sedona again after the over-populated underfunned first attempt, but we'd handed over actual moneys for a trail map, and there's snow in Northern California, so we figured we'd just grin and bear it for another day or two before hightailing it to Vegas and Boulder City for some luxury and some hardcore riding respectively. We certainly didn't expect to spend two days and nights riding the unmapped illegal Sedona trail network - hell, we didn't even know it existed!

We'd met Darch (Hi Darch!) at Gooseberry Mesa, and hooked up again when we arrived back in Sedona from Black Canyon. He'd been riding with the Doctor* and his crew for a couple of days, and they took us with them when they set off for Monday's ride, along with one of the other sets of Canadians we'd met at Gooseberry, Bruce and Ardelle, who we spied riding up the road we were being driven up in a truck. We'd finally managed to source brake pads for Nene, which was just as well given the ride: the aptly-named, mildly scary Hangover. When we'd mentioned the name to the guys at the bike shop** they'd said it was a) illegal and b) not very good. Turns out they were half-right: the Forest Service went so far as to send a crew of volunteers armed with wire-brushes to eradicate the painted bear-paw tracks that had been used to mark the trail. Now riders follow the wire-brush marks. We followed the Doctor up to a saddle, from where the trail drops down and across a rock face and into a narrow gap between wall and trees. Nene rode it with aplomb. I fell off and skinned my elbow. That was to be the pattern for us for the next two days.

Hangover is named for the series of rock overhangs beneath which the trail passes. The fear factor of the trail proper comes from the sheer drop on the downslope side of the trail, and the very real possibility of being shunted off by one's spare tyre or backpack whilst attempting to sneak by. We both survived, with some walkage, and then set off with a reduced group to ride some more of the awesomeness that is the semi- and illegal trail network which threads in and out of the legitimised, mapped system. We know where we went, in a general sort of way, but we'll probably not be leading any guided rides any time soon; there are more non-legit trails than there are mapped ones, they're not signposted, and some of them don't even have bike tyre marks: we carried our bikes on our shoulders in past visible range before remounting and setting off again. Once again, Nene rode incredibly; the only dismount she did was forced by me jumping off in front of her and blocking the trail. I wasn't quite so flash, to the extent that not only did I manage a pinch-flat from riding too fast and with not enough skill, but I didn't even fix it myself; I'd been chasing the incredibly fast, incredibly smooth-riding Canadian Renfrew* down the short downhill section of Baldwin that we hit when I flatted. By the time I had the bike upside-down and the wheel off, he had ridden back up, and before I quite knew what was going on he'd pulled the dead tube without using tyre-levers to get the tyre off, partially-inflated the new tube using his lungs, placed the new tube and re-seated the tyre, and inflated it using a compressed air canister he'd produced from somewhere. He handed the wheel back to me within a couple of minutes of the flat occurring, and I was so discombobulated that I said I was discombobulated, and then I had trouble putting my wheel back on. Impressive bastardo.

Back at the homestead, we took Baxter* up on her offer of showers, and it felt so incredibly good to be clean that we were near dancing on the table. In the interest of not getting kicked out of the house before we got a chance to eat delicious foods and talk with interesting peoples, we refrained.








* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty

** = Yes, that's the same guys at the bike shop that sent us off on Bell Rock and Templeton on a holiday(ish) weekend.

"I Suppose I Can't Blame It Entirely On the Lizard"

Short Version:
Guns in the sun, angry plants, a hard day's ride with real lizards, fried-egg sandwiches

Long Version:
Unfortunately for us, the same semi-official long weekend which had cluttered Sedona's inner trails with day-hikers and -bikers meant that the desert around the Black Canyon Trail's southern trailhead at Table Mesa was far from deserted. In fact, we managed to stumble into the midst not only of an ATV convention, with all the attendant glories of fat sweaty people who talk loud and laugh obnoxious laughter too often and too forcefully; but also a competitive target-shooting weekend outing. Knowing, as we do, that Arizona is gun central, we probably shouldn't have been surprised that an area of desert within an hour's drive of a major city in this firearms-mad state would be populated with shooters of all shapes and sizes, discharging weapons of all shapes and sizes, on a sunny Saturday afternoon on a long(ish) weekend... but we were.

Not as surprised as I was, though, not long after we found a spot not in anyone's firing line and not next to the fattest or greasiest-looking ATV crowds, when a cactus I walked past leaped out and attacked me. I was shocked, and mildly horrified, and in pain, and a wee bit scared, because I absolutely had not touched the vicious plant-like evildoer, and yet there was a big chunk of it attached to my leg with enormous, barbed spikes. It was the exact same type of cactus that had attacked me in the exact same manner down in the Baja, near the disembowelled dog on the outskirts of the horrible shitty city, only this bespiked menace seemed healthier. Maybe fat Amerikans are more nutritious than skinny Mexicanos. It took a while to get the thing off me, and the horror stayed with me afterwards, banished only when Nene managed to turn her butt into a pincushion for a prickly pear, which meant that I got so busy using tweezers and the last of the sunlight that I forgot to keep freaking out about the jumping nasties.

The assortment of weaponry which was being employed in our vicinity was staggering. Not only were we hearing the flat crack of rifles and the deep booming of shotguns, but also semi- and fully-automatic weapons, and an occasional huge bass thud that had us thinking of dynamite and mortars (and not the kind that have pestles as partners). The artillery cacophony carried on well after darkness fell but we figure that people must have gotten too drunk to reload because eventually the echoes of the last percussive reports faded, and we ended up getting one of the best nights' sleeps of the trip so far - maybe subconsciously figuring that no-one was going to be stupid enough to be messing with anyone else in a place where absolutely everybody was armed to the teeth and had spent most of the weekend brushing up on their targetting skills.

They started again early the next morning, but we were already up and about, and were riding not long afterwards; past the fat, greasy ATV crowd (who were just beginning to rouse after what had no doubt been a hard night of carousing with quality beverages and snack foods) and onto the trail. It turned out to be crowded on both sides by plants with spikes: the jumping ones, prickly pears, even cartoon-stereotype giant saguaros. Nene got scratched-up during an encounter with one of the evil kowhai relations, but had a scapelizard handy. Between the undulating terrain, the dry heat, and the mixed-bag of trail surfaces that included sketchy loose-over-hardpack and soft, wheel-eating fine sand, it was a hell of a hard work ride.

We'd both been fantasizing about the fried-egg sandwiches we were going to have when we made it back to the Reaper for a while by the time we saw the lizard. I thought I was hallucinating at first; it was too big, and far too pink-and-brown for unreserved believability. But Nene saw it too, and so did the camera, and then it hid in the bushes so we carried on, back to the trailhead, where we saw a man so fat that I almost rode into a cactus while staring at him, and then we cooked and ate fried-egg sandwiches, and they were really, really good.

My, What a Big Fat Ass You Have...

Short Version:
Sedona: land of affluent tourism. And fat people.

Long Version:
Sedona, Arizona is a tourist town. A comfortably-affluent tourist town, with too many art galleries to count, a bunch of nice-looking restaurants and hotels, and a liquor store which houses a fine collection of bespoke handmade bottles of sage wine, pear brandy and old, theoretically wonderful tequilas. We bought dark, coffee-infused Hawaiian beer from the liquor store, and nothing from any of the galleries (although the huge stone bear looming massively outside one of them was pretty special). We did buy some brake pads and a map from one of the several local bike shops, and picked their brains extensively in pursuit of optimum local ride options.

We settled on a trail combo described by one of the bike shop guys as his favorite local ride, chatted a while with Kumeu locals Logan and Joy (Hi Logan and Joy!), and then set off up the road to the Bell Rock Path trailhead. Many, if not most of the trails we've found on this continent have been mixed-use, which is a definite contrast to NZ's trail systems. Most of the time it's not proved problematic, and we've been edging towards a belief that there really isn't that much need to keep varying recreational interests quite so comprehensively segregated. People have been almost unfailingly polite, and the biggest access issue we've struck thus far has been that comical situation where everyone is attempting to defer to everyone else, and no-one actually moves. This was true of the Bell Rock Path, and of the Templeton, Baldwin, Little Horse and Llama Trails as well, but the sheer volume of other trail users was nightmarish; it got to the point where it seemed like every time we got up some speed, or started to relax into the flow of the ride we ran into one or more groups of people, be they hikers in twos or fours or mores, or bikers on rental machines picking their way gingerly along the trail on foot or on wheels. A couple of times we nearly introduced ourselves vehemently to piles of bikes abandoned mid-trail while their temporary custodians took pictures of large red rocks and/or each other.

Pretty soon we were a-hating, although the downhill section on the Baldwin Loop was pretty cool, and the enormously (seriously, ENORMOUS) fat woman who fell on her enormously fat arse in the river just as we rode past was a definite highlight. The Llama Trails were less occluded and therefore more rideable, but by then we were tired and grouchy, so as soon as we made it back to the Reaper we left town and drove further south towards Phoenix, seeking the more remote ride of awesomeness the bike shop guys had spoken of: the Black Canyon Trail.

The Big Freeze

Short Version:
Cold. An aborted ride, re-ridden after caffeine. We leave town in search of warm.

Long Version:
Before we could ride, we needed caffeine and foods. Before we could make caffeiny goodness, we had to turn ice into water, and before we could do that we needed to get the stuff out of the bottle it was frozen inside. It took a while, but we got there eventually, and before long we were on the bikes, blasting down the road to the trailhead. Both of us were complaining about the cold, albeit with reference to differing body parts: Nene's fingers were frozen, and I had serious toe discomfort afoot. On the bright side, we had one fully-functional set of digits between us.

We stopped at the trailhead to try to warm the extremities, but it wasn't working so we gave up pretty quickly and set off up the Schultz Pass Trail. It was pretty nice riding, but it was cold. Really cold. We made slow, heavy going of what should have been an easy ride, and gave up after half an hour when it became apparent that hands and feet weren't getting any warmer, and that their iciness was making what should have been an extremely pleasant jaunt in the forest into a really unpleasant ordeal.

One warming cup of Macy's caffeiney goodness and some eggy deliciousness later we returned for a second attempt, and found the valley up which the Schultz Pass Trail runs much less chilled than it had been in the early morning. It still wasn't tropical though, and we were soon riding past patches of snow and ice-rimmed puddles. One downhill corner was so completely icy that I looked at it and thought: I wonder, if one went too fast and one's wheels slid out from under one, whether it would hurt more than usual when one hit the frozen ground.

The answer, apparently, was yes.

At Schultz Pass we hooked onto the Secret Trail, and from there across to Upper Moto. We tried to ride Anthony's Slutty Sister, but gave up and went back to Upper Moto, where we found a boulder field with lots of tricky technical stuff. Lower Moto was more open and flowing, and we got fast before we got finished. Only two and a half hours out, but the cold made it feel like more. Discussing the ride later we agreed that the trails, like the town, had reminded us a lot of Bend; a nice mix of technical and not; fast and flowing sections contrasting with tight, tricky bits.

We left, with peanut butter sandwiches, and drove through the scenic Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona and Oak Creek Village and a scrubby patch of desert south of town where we parked ourselves for the night.

Coffee!

Short Version:
The Reaper harvests snow, a cold night and a colder morning. We find seriously good coffee and shitty decorative craft.

Long Version:
The snow that had been falling on us as we hiked up out of the Grand Canyon was unevil, mellow snowfall. It was kind of like being in one of those knick-knack snowstorm globe things after someone feeble has given it a gentle shake, and things are settling down agan after the mild turbulence. Up at the top it was a different story, and once we were a-Reapering at speed it was downright scary. Kind of neat though, especially the way the snow flew up past the windscreen without actually hitting it. It seemed very much like how hyperspace travel might manifest itself, should we ever crack that long-held dream tech, although the prospect of entering hyperspace in the Reaper is at least mildly bemusing.

It wasn't particularly warm, either.

We skipped the Visitor Centre and set off downhill, towards the I-40 and Flagstaff. The snow stopped as we dropped, and we had clear skies by the time we reached the fringes of the Kaibab National Forest, where we set up camp not next to the dead thing and slept the intermittent sleep of the not-warm-enough, waking to icy everything. Water bottles were frozen solid and shut, the tarp covering the bikes was a rigid sheet of white, and in the end it came down to a bladder-control contest to see who got fed breakfast in bed.

Once her ladyship had finished her repast and deigned to exit her down-filled coccoon into the chilly, sunny Thursday morning, we set off for Flagstaff, which appeared to be in the process of waking up. Counter-culture kids were everywhere, meandering about the place with hair of all colors and cuts and stages of mattedness. They seemed to be centred largely at a place called Macy's. It had wi-fi and a laundromat next door, so we decided to use our current bedraggledness to full advantage and infiltrate the joint.

Best coffee in North Amerika.

Better than the Back Porch Cafe in Bend. Better than... nope, there hasn't been anywhere else good. Seriously, coffee in Amerika is total pants. The stuff we make in our nifty stovetop espresso thing is umpteen times better than the filth that gets doled out at cafes and diners across the continent. It's so bad that Starbucks is actually not shit, comparatively speaking.

But not at Macy's, on Beaver St, in Flagstaff, Arizona, Amerika. The food was really good too: cheesy eggy goodness. The people-watching was excellent, interwebs were robust, and the only downside was the owner's or owner's spouse's or spawnlet's blithering shite arty photography plastered all over the walls. I will never regain the minutes I spent looking at the one in front of me while Nene booked us a Vegas hotel; they are lost forever, burned wastefully on a piece of pretentious craft masquerading as art. That last bit is a flaw with photography in general, not with Mr. Macy's stuff in particular. Mr. Macy just added a personal crime against discerning humanity by posing subjects abysmally, tritely, and phonily. Horrible.

60% of the Australo-British Grand Canyon band put in an appearance; they'd managed to espy a cougar in the snow as they left the Park the previous day. We were jealous. We weren't jealous of their next mission, though: a Greyhound bus trip. We went thrift-store shopping. All over town. Didn't buy much, though; everything was, again, just not-quite. Nene bought a hat. The beer and the food at the Flagstaff Brewing Co were excellent, and it was a happy pair who hooked off into the woods and camped up the road from the trailhead from which we were to ride the next morning, although the evening was ominously chilly...

The Grand Canyon. It's Quite Grand.

Short Version:
Mormon knowledge, a walk in a bloody big ditch. A band that wasn't, a crippled meatophile, color-coded geological history, snow. And it's all OCD-friendly!

Long Version:
Neither of us had heard of Pipe Springs National Monument, but we were passing, and had a pass, so we stopped. We were glad we had, because we learned more about the Mormons (in whose State we'd been frolicking for the past month) in an hour than we had in all the time we spent in Utah*. My favorite thing was the revolving shelving unit; Nene liked the horse. I didn't get to feed a peppermint to the shelving unit though. There were Texas Longhorn cattle in a pen (they have long horns) and some seriously crazy ducks in the tree-lined pond, and then there was cheap gas at the Indian-owned station and we were off again, through Fredonia and Kanab and on into Page, where we ate uninspiring fast-food burritos sold to us by an incredibly enthusiastic young chap with quite bad skin.

Weird stuff had been happening on the road, with several mouse-like critters attempting crossings with varying degrees of success. The chaos ratcheted up a notch just after Antelope Pass when a pickup pulled out in front of us as we blasted along at just under the 65mph speed limit. We managed to not die, then disappeared off into the Kaibab National Forest to camp in a grove of somewhat bedraggled trees, with a planned early start for Grand Canyon day.

And an early start it was, although "early" is not the thing it'll be remembered for: it was COLD! Frozen windows and water-bottles.

The watch-tower at the Desert View Lookout hadn't opened for the day before we moved on to the next spot, and it was still chilly as we wandered aroud the ruined Indian village. Eventually we found a lookout with sun, and with minimal wind, and we breakfasted while looking out over what really is an amazing spectacle. Pictures don't do the place justice. The canyon is absolutely immense: it averages ten miles across and is over a mile deep in places, and the rocks in the lower reaches have been dated as being over 1800-million years old. They're dark grey. The geological history of the place is exposed in the cliff walls, and color-coded for your convenience: a band of cream amongst the orange here; a series of dark stripes a few hundred feet lower; a giant green shelf halfway down where harder rock has arrested the effects of erosion and has been colonised by hardy scrub.

We weren't the only early risers already on the move; others included:
- The Amerikan couple who emigrated to Williams Lake (for goodness' sake, why?). They were turned away at the US border last time they came back for a visit because they had their pet cockatoo with them.
- The Anglo-Amerikan couple from North Carolina. He spent twelve years and fifty-thousand dollars jumping through immigration hoops in pursuit of US citizenship. They told us about the Horseshoe Mesa hike, a few stops further along the way, and said that they'd been told it was worth exploring.

Having now done the Horseshoe Mesa hike, we concur.

There was an incredible amount of signage at the top of the trail, much of it safety-oriented, and geared towards making people not die as a result of heat- or water-related issues. We had plenty of water, and the chill wind was still blowing so we had our packs full not only with delicious foods but also with numerous hard-weather garments.

We set off at 11:11, down a steep and sketchy path. It got steeper and sketchier. We met a group of men on their way out from a multi-day trip. From all across the southern States of the US, they've been doing an annual hiking trip for thirty years. We told them they should come hike in NZ. We also met some interesting folks from non-Chicago Illinois (I never knew there was anything else there), and then we met the not-band.

Two Australians and three Brits, dressed in an assortment of styles appropriate for pretty much any urban setting you could name. They didn't look very much like hikers, but did look very much like a British band out filming a video, albeit one that's several hours long and doesn't change much. As one of the Australians said when it was mentioned, they must be a prog rock band.

We hiked about halfway down into the canyon, past the orange and the cream and the brown sections, and the light grey and the crimson-and-yellow. Not long after the translucent green, we were on the flat, and making our way out along the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa to the end, where we found wonderful, awe-inspiring views in all directions, including not only along and along, but also up and down. And then we got to walk back up.

As we'd hiked down, we'd turned occasionally and looked back up at what we'd clambered down. It looked cool. Once we'd turned at our end point and started walking back up, though, it no longer looked quite so excellent; it looked, more than anything, like a bloody hard slog waiting to be done. The path was visible only very occasionally, but what was plain at all times was that it went up. And up. And up. The signs at the top had told us to budget 2-3 times as long to do the return climb as we spent hiking down, which meant we were looking at 4-6 hours of climbing. Yikes.

Then it started to snow.

Then we met the carnivore. He was haranguing the Australians about being anemic because of their vegetarianism. He was bemused when told that we were vego also: "But you have color in your cheeks!" he cried. He was then left far behind on the climb up out of the canyon; a fact which was originally upheld as exemplarising the power of eggplant, but which we suspect may actually have had something to do with the fact that he was mildly twisted, physically speaking, and incapable of striding or even scuttling with any great speed. Didn't stop him yelling "MEAT!" at us every time he caught sight of us as we made our way up through the switchbacks on the steepest part of the climb. We yelled "BEANS!" back at him.

The more obsessive-compulsive among you will be pleased to note that, having set off at 11:11, it took us 2 hours and 22 minutes to get to the end of the western arm of Horseshoe Mesa, and we arrived back at the van at 16:11, exactly five hours after we left. In addition, our last gasoline purchase, back on the Paiute Indian Reservation at Pipe Springs, was $55.55. Feel better now?








* = Apparently the Mormon Church wanted to call the state Deseret, which may or may not have a meaning to do with honeybees of some sort, but the Federal Government, which didn't like the Mormons much at all, overruled them and named it Utah after the Ute Indians who'd lived there before the polygamists moved in

Gooseberry

Short Version:
Hard rain, hard ride. Hard, awesome ride. With hard rocks to land on, and cacti without spikes. Lovely stuff.

Long Version:
Cold. Rain overnight, and we could see more coming. When it arrived, we discovered that some of it was hail.

We rode anyway: South Rim Trail, Cattle Guard and God's Skateboard Bowl sections; Hidden Canyon; North Rim Trail; White and Yellow Trails to the Point; South Rim Rattlesnake section; Hidden Canyon; North Rim and White back to camp. No idea how much ground we covered, and all the backtracking and re-riding we did means that working it out would be onerous. We were out for just over five hours, and pretty much all of it was demanding, rewarding, difficult technical riding. A lot of it followed the edge of a more-or-less long-way-down cliff, which was occasionally scary. We were pleased that the strong, gusty wind was coming up over the rim, pushing us away from the edge instead of towards or over it. One of us (not Nene) face-planted on some rocks at one point - ironically, on the easier-than-most North Rim Trail. We both rode stuff we didn't know we could ride, had a bunch of fun, and ended up blimmin tired, and really really happy after some of the best riding we'd found on the trip to date. We'd seen heaps of prickly-pears, including many carrying startling crimson fruit and some with no prickles (unprickly pears? smooth pears? nubby pears?). We also met lots of Canadians, including a bloke from Merritt, a woman from Canmore and one from Golden, and two chaps from Victoria, including the business partner of one of the guys with whom we rode the Mckenzie River Trail back in June. Small, small world.

The trails were great, so we stayed the night and rode again in the morning. Tentative arrangements to meet some of the Canadians in the morning were thwarted, at least temporarily, by the end of Daylight Savings - no wonder I was grouchy; I got up at six! - but we did eventually hook up with Merritt Darch for an hour or so towards the end of the three and a half hours we were out. We re-rode some of the stuff we'd ridden the day before, and some new stuff, including an easy roll out to a derelict windmill and back. The wind was substantially weaker than the day before, and the sun was shining. Hidden Canyon the opposite direction was awesome, as was God's Skateboard Bowl. We met another set of Canadians, then ate reconstituted mashed potato mixed with tinned sweetcorn back at the van before setting off south and east into Arizona, home of the Grand Canyon.

Huge, Variously-Colored Monoliths

Short Version:
We are a blockage! Huge, variously-colored monoliths.

Long Version:
We're getting our money's worth from our US National Parks Annual InterAgency Pass: Yellowstone; Grand Teton; Fossil; Arches; Bryce Canyon; and now, just down the road from the Thunder Mountain Trail, Zion. We spent enough time chatting to the chatty Ranger lady at the entrance that:
- We found out what we should see and do in the Park
- We found out how to get from there to our next actual destination, Gooseberry Mesa ("I'll tell you so long as you don't tell anyone else about it.")
- We caused a entrance gate queue to form from nothing and grow to at least six vehicles. Ha ha! [shakes fist] Did you feel that, vehicles?!?!?

Once into the Park proper, we found awesome things to look at on all sides; huge, variously-colored monoliths, looming to our left and our right. We spent so much time driving on the wrong side of the road that it was like being back in NZ, only with huge, variously-colored monoliths all over the place. Eventually we got a bit tired of all the adrenaline that we were getting from all the near-miss head-on incidents, and decided that maybe Nene should look at the cool stuff and I should make us not die. Then we reached the tunnel.

We've driven through tunnels before, in several countries and in a variety of vehicles, but we've not seen anything like this one before. It had corners, for a start. And viewing portals, through which one could see out through the cliff wall and across the ravine to whatever huge, variously-colored monoliths happened to be in line with the window. There were signs all over the place demanding that we refrain from stopping in the tunnel, and we obeyed them mercilessly. A bit. Not at all.

Pretty soon we were at the main canyon, where we joined the other vehicles - including several tandem bicycles, which all seemed to have a bloke at the front, pedalling hard, and a woman perched on the back, sitting up and smiling and looking around and taking photographs - driving from viewing spot to viewing spot up into the gorge. The huge, variously-colored monoliths were spectacular, and often bore little or no resemblance to even their closest neighbours in either size, shape, or color. Pointed red peaks stood shoulder-to-shoulder with rounded, bulbous cream entities; mottled red-and-black behemoths towered over narrow burnt-orange fingers. Threaded through it all were trees exhibiting a similar variety of hue in their leaves; colors from the vivid green of baby crocodiles to the red-brown of dried blood, and hit every shade of yello and orange along the way.

A stop at the Visitor Centre yielded encounters with stupid people, 3-dimensional topographic represeantations of the Park and its huge, variously-colored monoliths, and some rather nifty architectural features. But no internets, so it was off to the Publc Library we toddled! Apart from the fact that we didn't know where it was, and had so far overshot it by the time we stopped for a small amount of overpriced gasoline that we decided to just go play up on the Mesa instead.

Ranger lady had told us that rain was forecast for the morning, and that if it did come we should stay up there rather than trying to make it back down the access road, which she said was dangerous when wet. Turns out it was pretty gnarly when dry too, but the Reaper handled it with aplomb, even passing another vehicle on the way up. Admittedly it was a 1974 Mercedes UniMog which had been painted yellow and stuffed full of tourists, but it was still an uphill passing success. Once at the top we still had several miles of shitty dirt/rock road to negotiate to get to the trailhead, and to an excellent campsite, fifty metres away from the start of the infamous Gooseberry Mesa Trails. With views of the now-distant huge, variously-colored monoliths.

Thunder Mountain (is Good)

Short Version:
Outlaws, #113, snow, hoodoos.

Long Version:
We'd heard some great things about the Thunder Mountain Trail, both from people we've met and from faceless anonymities on the interwebs. We did a minor navigation fail before we even arrived, and camped at the wrong trailhead, but given that camping was disallowed at either location and the "right" trailhead was right next to the Ranger Station, our fail was probably actually an accidental win. And the place we camped was once the hideout of famous outlaw Butch Cassidy, which is pretty cool.

We set off up the paved Red Canyon cycleway to the top end of the canyon, then bailed into the woods on the #113 Road, although not without some debate over whether the #112 Road on the other side of the highway was actually the one we were seeking. Victory for the #113, and then not far past the Horse Camp we hit the Coyote Hollow Trailhead, which heralded the advent of singletrack. Not all downhill though; the first half hour or so was a series of descents into lateral ravines, each followed by a climb back out the other side. Nene managed to flat on the way in to the deepest one, which had snow still covering the ground in the shadowed sections; we figured the tiny rain we'd had overnight down low had translated to some snowfall up higher.

Satisfactorily unflatted we set off again, and found ourselves climbing onto a ridgeline that afforded some pretty stunning views down into Red Canyon and several subsidiaries; there were Hoodoos galore, and if we hadn't seen a bunch of them already at Bryce Canyon we'd've been totally gobsmacked. As it was, they were still well cool, but there was a chill wind blowing across the exposed ridge, so we carried on, dropping down a series of loose-surfaced switchbacks into Red Rock Canyon, where we found scenic variants on what we'd appreciated from above, along with a few technical ride challenges, although most of that came from the surprise factor of high-speed post-corner feature discovery. The last mile and a half out to the road was flatter and smoother - except for the washes where there'd been some obvious recent flash-flood action - and we hit some extreme speeds before popping out of the side-canyon mouth and back onto the paved trail for the last mile and a half back up to the Reaper. Two hours well spent, and we could see why folks from all over had been complimentary.

A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow*

Short Version:
We drive through some deserts and commit vehicular manslaughter on our way to a spectacular place full of magical rocks that gets really flipping cold at night.

Long Version:
The road from Goblin Valley to Bryce Canyon is a Scenic Byway, and passes through all manner of strange and veautiful regions:
- sandy, dune-filled desert
- rocky, jagged desert
- hilly, rounded desert
- desert mesas and buttes
- deserted desert
- desert full of deserted pickup trucks
- desert towns, falling down
- cliffs
- bizarre rock formations
- sweeping vistas
- mountains
- forests
- red rock hillsides
- orange rock hillsides
- yellow rock hillsides
- black rock hillsides
- white rock hillsides
- stripey hillsides

After the stripey hillsides, we reached Bryce Canyon Natioal Park, but not before the Reaper harvested another squirrel. For some reason every roadkill squirrel we've seen (apart from the pancaked furry red splodge ones) adopts in death a super-cute pose, lying supine with front paws held just under the chin, rear legs splayed out in front. They look like they're actors in some children's stage show who have been asked to be dead in a non-threatening, overdone, obvious, cartoony sort of way.

It cost far too much to camp in the National Park, so we left, and went next door to the National Forest. The dedicated campground had a fee as well, so we drove on down the road to a spot by a creek, set ourselves up, and ate burritos and chocolate until it was time to go to sleep.

We awoke late, largely because the ice on the windows was blocking all the light. It was seriously cold. We debated the relative coldnesses of this morning v the morning at Polecat Creek at the front end of the Big Day of Yellowstone, and agreed the latter was freezier.

We made our way back in to the National Park, to the Visitor Center where we found free internets and an informational screen which said it had got down to -2 degrees overnight. That explains why my feets got cold. The informational signage around the place was busy telling us that the park has over two hundred freeze/thaw days each year, which is a lot, and is one of the primary causes for the startling rock formations which abound there: during the day the water runs into nooks and crannies in the rock; then when it freezes overnight the expansion** stresses the already-weak rock and eventually splits it.

I'm not going to try to describe the formations; I know for a fact that Lovely Wife took umpteen photographs, so you can jolly well wait for her to upload them***. Suffice to say they were startling and stunning and realy really cool.

We ogled the rocks from three of the park's hiking trails: The Queen's Garden, the Navajo Loop, and the Peek-a-Boo Loop. Apparently the combo is a 10km, 4-5 hour hike. We ran it in two hours, but half of that was spent taking photographs. We then drove to the end of the park - it extends out along a limb of a high plateau - and took photographs at the many viewpoints accessible from the roadway. Most were so close to the road that you bareky had to leave your vehicle; those which involved a short walk tended to be fairly empty. The exception was Sunset Point, which afforded some seriously awesome views once you managed to squeeze between the sizeable Amerikans and the teeming hordes of East Asians, all of whom seemed to be speaking incredibly loudly. We've seen very few East Asians on the journey so far (Chinatowns in Vancouver and San Francisco excepted), which is a huge change from Auckland. We had to laugh at one point out near the end of the park, when we watched a middle-aged woman of East Asian extraction attempting to park her car. In a deserted parking lot. She ended up using two spaces for her compact hatchback. Sigh.

We found showers at the General Store (of course) and then hit the road west, towards Red Canyon and Thunder Mountain, and a ride we'd heard some very good things about.








* = Ebenezer Bryce said that, some time in the mid-late 1800s, in response to a query on what it was like to live near the canyon that would later wear his name

** = Water expands when it freezes. This is unlike most substances, and is why, when you put a beer in the freezer to chill it quickly you should always remember to not forget it's in there

*** = Or, if you're an impatient scallywag, you can ask Mr Google to show you some pictures. Make sure the stupid "Safe Search" filter is set to OFF, cos you never know your luck.

Goblins in the Sun

Short Version:
Goblins, mining, sunbathing

Long Version:
Goblin Valley State Park is in the middle of nowhere, assuming that nowhere is an area in mid-eastearn Utah.

The goblins for which it is named are humanoid stone features, wind- and water-carved and ranging in size from small human child to Godzilla. Actually, we saw one that was shaped a lot like Godzilla, about an hour-and-a-half into our wanderings through the valleys where these truly bizarre constructs form, exist, and then eventually crumble into nothingness. Weird, and definitely wonderful.

We stopped for the night at Temple Mountain, which was in the mid-twentieth century the site of a thriving uranium mining endeavour, and a sizeable township which had grown up around its pits. Little remains save occasional half-concealed holes in the ground, tumbled support timbers which have cracked and splintered, and broken pieces of concrete lying at strange angles to one another near rusting plumbery.

The sun was shining, and tiny lizards were basking in its radiance. We followed their example, and judging from the protracted staring from the dirtbikers who blatted past, we weren't quite what they'd expected to see amidst the ruined ghost-town. Actually, they were probably just checking Nene out - I certainly was.

Cycling and Recycling

Short Version:
Slickrock again. A Fox on the Rocks. Footage. Anarchy rules!

Long Version:
Our neighbour gave us a cheery wave as we drove out of the campground in the morning, which I thought was rather odd, given not only the chastisement he'd received the previous night but also his proximity to the campground's roofless toilet in which we'd de-beaned before we left. We waved back, though, as good neighbours do.

And then we went and rode the Slickrock Trail again, in the opposite, supposedly more difficult direction.

It was more difficult. Lovely Wife said not, but I'm beginning to doubt that she's actually human; she seemed once agin to be feeling absolutely no after-effects from the effortful slog we'd put in the previous day. And the day before. And the day before that. In fact, we were on our ninth consecutive significant ride day, and she looked, rode, and smelled like she'd just stepped out of a salon. Cow.

We stopped only thrice:
- For lunch and to photograph Marian's cactus
- For shots of Nene riding near Shrimp Rock
- To film ourselves on the switchback hillclimb made famous by the Fifth Horseperson of the Apocalypse during our last visit

At that last stop we were stunned to see a fox run up the hill, then pause, looking back over his shoulder at us reproachfully before disappearing over the lip. Unfortunately we were so stunned we didn't think to photograph it, but then we made ourselves feel all better again by getting heaps of awesome footage of each of us doing particularly tasty technically-sound riding on the tricky climb and descent. Except that I didn't quite manage to actually film any of Nene's efforts, because I couldn't quite get the hang of pushing the one button needed to start filming. I'd made her ride up and down several times too, to get different angles. Oops.

We dumped our long-held recyclables at the Recycling Station, where we were amused by the sight of all of the employees gathered together for a break, smoking cigarettes directly beneath an enormous "No Smoking" sign. Then we hit the thrift store, where yet again there were many many things of great awesomeness that fitted Nene perfectly, and several that were just too small for me, or just slightly too worn or not quite excellent enough to warrant the $4 outlay. Disappointing!

Showers at Poison Spider Bicycles made me feel much better though, especially because the bearded anarchist at the counter didn't charge us for them. I think the waddling couple from the Amerikan Mid-West who were there at the same time we were might have paid for ours as well as their own, but that's only fair and reasonable.

And then we were off into the desert again, to the junction where we'd been pounded by storms twice. It was like coming home, which is kind of scary.

USA Loop #2, Day 20

We paid to camp at the Slickrock Trail trailhead.

It was ten dollars.

That brings our total accomodation costs for this leg of the trip to...

Ten dollars.

Average cost/night: Fifty cents.

That's pretty good, unless you're talking about the rap guy, who is pretty not-good, although not as not-good as the really rude one with the bad haircut, although that doesn't actually narrow it down much. The one who interrupted the vanilla country-pop star's award acceptance speech. I can never remember whether he's the one who molests pre-teens or whether that's one of the other, equally unlistenable and unlikeable tardomatic shitbuckets that pass as pop stars these days.

The guy in the campsite three down from us (in an otherwise unoccupied thirty-site campground) decided to play some of the so-called "music" that emanates from these so-called recording "artists" at intolerably high volume (ie audible) just after we went to bed.

I didn't bother putting pants on before I went to have a wee chat.

It wasn't a long conversation, and afterwards I was able to stand outside, staring at the incredibly-bright starscape and luxuriating in the utter soundlessness of the desert night for quite some time before the cold had me leaping back into the Reaper and back into my fartsack.

We slept well.

Spiders

Short Version:
Tired. Return to Moab. A ride in the desert (funny, that). Bad bank.

Long Version:
We were tired when we arose the day after our Western Rim - Zion Curtain - Kokopelli mission. Actually, I tell a lie: I was tired. Someone else was claiming box-of-birdsness. Still, there were no complaints emanating from Lovely Wife when the leisurely start to the day dragged on a wee bit longer than originally planned: delicious caffeiney goodness was drunk, bikes were fiddled with (in an entirely appropriate way), sun was sat in. Eventually, though, we got back on the road, heading back westwards, back into Utah, and, in the end, back to Moab.

Lovely Wife had been somewhat put out when we left Moab without earning ourselves a spider sticker by riding the Poison Spider Trail. This was somewhat surprising, given that she's been known to wake her long-suffering husband in the middle of the night to demand that he "Get them off me!" Extra irony points on the grounds that aforesaid husband is equally, if not more arachnophobic than she is*.

Still, the dinosaur footprints halfway up the cliff at the trailhead were pretty cool, and the trail itself was... actually the trail itself was, as everyone who'd ridden it had told us, an ordeal. It comprised three parts energy-sapping wheel-hugging ankle-deep red sand to one part bone-jarring rock ridges, almost all of which were arranged perpendicular to our path. Little Arch was the definite highlight: at the edge of a sheer cliff, high above the river and highway, and climbable. Fantastic combo, except for the amost falling off part.

At the end of the Poison Spider Trail, which is shared by bikers, hikers, horses, motorbikes, and 4x4s, one turns around and comes back the way one went out. Unless one is a motor-vehiclist with a decent map of the convoluted subsidiary trail network, in which case one can go play on small, sketchy dirt roads to one's heart's content. Or unless one is a hiker or biker who is not particularly risk averse, in which case one can take The Portal.

People have not died on The Portal.

People have died after falling off The Portal.

Apparently it's quite easy to do. Especially when it's getting dark.

Being a manly man, I argued the case for riding The Portal in the face of Nene's stated desire to return to the trailhead via the Poison Spider. I was careful not to be too persuasive, though, and soon we were headed back the way we'd come, albeit with a few wrong turns as the setting sun washed out our ability to spy trail markings. It took just under an hour to re-cover the ground we'd taken two-and-a-half to cross on the outbound leg, and we arrived back at the van just in time to nip another bout of nappy-rash in the bud before using the Moab Express Laundromat's free customer wi-fi connection to call the National Bank in NZ, in another attempt to get them to actually do some stuff they'd been promising for over two months. In the end, we had to get tetchy, but they promised to have it done overnight, which was soon enough for us to not starve or be stuck mid-desert without gasoline, but not soon enough to keep our custom long-term.







* = Seriously, in our house a spider of any size has more comprehensive squatter's rights than humans get even in the most liberally-inclined societies, just by being too damned scary to evict

Chafing

Short Version:
A fantastic and quite long ride. Strange midgets.

Long Version:
Invermeremortal Lori had told us that the Western Rim Trail was her all-time favorite. High praise indeed, coming from someone who's ridden so extensively. We'd stolen Travis' map of the area, but were mildly baffled by the convoluted squiggly line we were supposed to be following once we got past the free-and-easy run down the navigational-difficulty-free Kokopelli and Parallel #2 access trails. We ended up taking what turned out to be the correct trail despite my best efforts to get us to go the other way; Nene was unkeen on the flying 1000ft soft-sand descent and took us right instead, on a trail that led us around the rim of a convoluted, squiggly canyon made of variously yellowish and whitish sandstone.

The views were phenomenal. Stunning vistas opened out around almost every corner; out over May Flats with its dense stands of bright orange- and yellow-leaved cottonwood trees to the Colorado River, running sluggish and red in the near distance. More mountains loomed on the far side of the plain. Closer to us there were stone entities on every side; standalone pillars; castle-like structures of all shapes and sizes; and everywhere we looked the Rim we were following, turning back on itself like some Escherish construct; overhangs left, right, and centre; beautiful, organic curves every place we looked. It seemed like we'd not been riding it long when it ended, dumping us down a sketchy, steep hillface to the outer trailhead, and back onto the Kokopelli for another ten miles or so of dirt road before we reached our next turnoff: the Zion Curtain.

Never let it be said that mountain-bike trail-builders are not at least as witty as the people who name suburban hair salons. The Zion Curtain follows the Utah side of the fence that delineates the Utah-Colorado border in this particular part of the desert. It hauls riders up an angled plateau, weaving to and fro across the hillside but always returning to the fence. Where the plateau meets the sky, we found ourselves standing high above the Castle Rocks Campground, which we'd passed twenty-or-so minutes into our ride that morning, thirty-or-so kilometres ago. As the crow flies, we were no more than 500m from the more bulbous of the stone features for which the campground is named, but being not crows we had a somewhat different journey ahead of us.

First there was the screaming descent from the high plateau. Literally screaming, in my case, a couple of times. It was mostly a lot of fun, with a few seriously hairy moments thrown in, just for laughs. Then a section of rolling dirt track with mounds in all the right places to render pedalling largely unnecessary. It meant standing up for quite a while, but we'd been riding for several hours by then, and my nether regions were rather pleased to be off the seat. Unfortunately for them, we soon(ish) reached the Kokopelli Trail again, and pedalling ensued. Funny how long fifteen miles can feel when your arse is killing you and you need to poop.

Still, we made it to Castle Rocks without major incident, apart from Nene face-planting in a mud puddle at high speed, and then we made our way slowly up the evil rock hill section back to camp. We'd been out for just under seven hours, of which almost all was spent riding. The campground was full of short, weird people, but we had eyes only for three things:
- Beer. Rogue Chocolate Stout. Oh-so delicious fermented chocolatey goodness. Nom nom nom nom nom*.
- Foods. The corn chips were half-gone by the time the tin of Western Family brand Mexican-Style Diced Tomatoes with Lime Juice and Cilantro was open, but the taste sensation after hours of dust-parched mouth was near-indescribably good. Nom nom nom nom nom*.
- Nappy-Rash Cream. Why buy expensive special cycling anti-chafing cream when generic supermarket-brand nappy-rash stuff does the job just as well, and for a fraction of the price?

The twisted dwarves finished their photo-shoot** and left, and we went to bed. We'd've drunk more beer if we had any, but we were all out, which was a wee bit sad, but not sad enough to keep us awake for long.







* = In the "Ingesting something delicious" sense, not the stupid French people "Without" meaning

** = Yes, seriously.

We Like the Night

Short Version:
We ride the 18 Road Area by day and by night and by day, then hit Grand Junction for some shuttling fun

Long Version:
We were camped right alongside some trails that we'd heard great things about, and were on the bikes pretty much as soon as we were awake. We rode for just over two hours, and during that time explored most of the inner trail system, the star of which was indisputably Kessel's Run; a fast, ultra-flowy gully chute with bermed corners and generally nice lines that enabled some massive speeds. We rode it first, and we rode it last, and then we bailed into town to steal internets and to try to hook up with our Coloradan downhill racer friend Travis, who we'd met many moons ago at the Blackrock trail network in Oregon, and who'd driven from the other side of Colorado to come ride with us (Hi Travis!). Our phonelessness hampered our attempts to locate him, but eventually we found him: back out at the 18 Road.

We bought some delicious foods and then headed back out to the foot of the Bookcliffs, where we found Travis and ate delicious foods. Then the boys went for another ride. In the dark. In horizontal, stingingly-cold rain. Lovely Wife laughed at our suggestion that she join us, and stayed warm and dry in the van with a good book. This, of course, meant that she was fresh as an irritating daisy the next morning when the three of us set off to ride a few more of the trails before leaving the area: some of the same ones as the previous day, with some extras thrown in. One of these new ones was my star trail of the day, which surprised both of the others because it was nearly flat and nearly straight. The others found it a bit bland, but I thought it was excellent; untaxing and relaxing, and named Vegetarian to boot.

More delicious foods then a convoy to nearby Grand Junction, where we (eventually) found the upper trailhead and set off to shuttle what the Fruita bike-shop guys had referred to as the two premier trails in the Grand Junction Lunch Loop network: Gunny and Holy Cross. Travis and I rolled Gunny first, and found a wee bit more pedalling required than we'd been expecting. He powered through a couple of downhill sections that I walked, and I rode up a couple of steep climbs that he eyed with disfavour before dismounting from his 8-inch-travel DH bike and hiking up. All told it was a lot of fun, and it was kind of sad to pop out at the road at the end of the trail. Especially so when we figured out that we'd emerged way down the hill from where we'd expected, which meant way down the hill from where Nene was waiting with Travis' enormous pickup truck, which meant a couple of miles of uphill road grunt still had to be done. Sigh.

Nene and Travis next, down the top section of Gunny, then into Pre-Nup and on through Holy Cross to the lower trailhead. Favorable reports (apart from one crash, not by Nene) meant that the next and final run of the day was Travis and I, on Pre-Nup, Holy Cross, and Holey Bucket. There was some great riding done, but not by me: I was having one of those runs where nothing goes quite to plan, and even dismounting to hike an obstacle left me with a pedal-inflicted charley-horsed calf. Sigh. Still a lot of fun though, and from the description the others gave of the arduous hike-a-bike up the final steep poke of Holy Cross I'm glad I was on the run that used Holey Bucket to bypass it.

We stopped for gas and were harrassed by bums for change, which we refused to hand over on the grounds of poverty. Then we went to a Mexican fast food place and inhaled WAY too much cheesy, beany goodness, which meant that after wishing Travis good luck on his six-hour drive home we had a musical and fragrant journey to Rabbit Valley, on the Colorado-Utah border.

Farewell, Invermin! So Long, Moab! Adios, Brodie the Dog!

Short Version:
Goodbye, Invermere friends! A Mexican feast, and one last Moab ride, complete with green cliffs, dino prints and lies about length. A red river, a horsefight, some pronghorns.

Long Version:
It was really rather sad saying goodbye to the Inverns, but we did so with high hopes of seeing at least some of them again, somewhere, sometime. And then we met Don and Christie at a Mexican restaurant called La Hacienda, where we set out to eat too much and achieved our goal with ease. Beans and cheese were coming out of our ears by the time we left, and it was a musical night in the tent, which we'd dried under the desert sun during the day while we were out riding, and finally actually got to sleep in again.

We enjoyed a leisurely morning in the sun, and eventually set off for one last ride with our neighbours; out along our road to the Klondike Bluffs trailhead, past greenish copper-laden cliffs capped with iron-rich red rock, and up onto the trail called Baby Steps, which proved, initially at least, to be a really fun climb up a mixture of dirt and grippy rock. We turned off onto the main Klondike Bluffs trail in search of dinosaur footprints, which we eventually found once Don stopped helping Christie navigate. They were very cool; huge, three-toed indentations in the rock, with a surprisingly strong sense of immense age.

Back onto Baby Steps, up under the eave of a huge, precariously-balanced rock, and away on a tight and twisting trail that was sometimes hard to follow, especially at speed. Both Nene and I missed corners, and were lucky to not wear cactus spikes as a result. We hit two major descents, separated by a fast section of the same dirt road that runs all the way in to Salt Valley in the Arches National Park, and a horrible climb made worse by repeated promises that we were nearly at the top.

And then we were riding out, past the green cliffs and along the dirt road back to camp, 3.5 hours and 30kms after we'd set out. Delicious beer punctuated our farewells to Don and Christie and Brodie the dog, and then we were off: up a gorge through which the Colorado River flowed red; past more strangely-shaped towers and plateaus; past a white horse and a brown, kicking and biting each other in a field full of flowers and unconcerned cows; past a herd of pronghorns near a dilapidated ghost-town called Cisco, whose falling-downness reminded us of Mexico; onto the Interstate; and eventually in to Fruita, where internets were stolen and the local dirtbag campspots located, out along the 18 Road at the foot of the mysteriously-named Bookcliffs.

Dirty Snowballs

Short Version:
Weird dreams, an incredible ride. Dolly.

Long Version:
Perched on a hill, upslope from Don and Christie and Brodie the miniature Amerikan Eskimo, we both dreamed some seriously weird dreams. Anti-gravitational furniture was demonstrated, Special Ops police forces were marshalled, toilets on the ski slopes refused to flush, and the desert was riddled with caves. Turns out that last one wasn't a dream; we were parked right next to one, in which a desert-rat soil-scientist had apparently been living up until relatively recently.

In the absence of the semi-mythical Larry, Don was in charge of the day's ride, which took us on unmarked trails up through a canyon and across a plateau of slickrock*. We paused at the edge of a sloping cliff, which meandered away into the distance, glowing red and orange in the light of the late-morning sun. "We're riding along that," Don said. Initial mirth gave way to mild and then not-so mild consternation as it became apparent that kidding he was not. "You'll be amazed at what you can stick to," he said, and sent the Weatherman off to ride laterally across something too steep to be called a sidehill, but not quite sheer enough to be named true vertical, in search of a spot from which to film. It looked insane, and awesome, and soon enough we were all at it, winding upslope and down as confidence increased.

We dropped onto a limb of rock, which led to a series of ever-lower, building-sized steps that dropped us eventually to the canyon floor, where thick sand and spiky plants awaited us. A short hike for those of us with an insufficient power-to-weight ratio to drive ourselves through the wheel-clutching red menace, and then we were back on grippy rock, heading up into a huge bowl where we settled for lunch before commencing a physical exploration of the tyre-holding capabilities of near-vertical faces. The bowl and the halfpipe above its rim were grand, and had that been the end of it we'd have ridden out to the trailhead a happy bunch.

But there was much, much more.

The exploratory riding we'd done on the cliff-face and in the bowl was but a taste of things to come as we reached the high plateau of Bartlett's Wash. It's huge, and is essentially a playground for riders, catering to all abilities in that however steep you want to ride there's a slope for you; however wide the carving turns you wish to indulge in, there's a place for you to do exactly that. There were small mounds and knobs of rock from which to launch oneself should one wish to do so, and there was immense joy to be had from diving down into sinkholes, circling the rim, and shooting back out, like a spaceworthy vessel using the gravity-well of a coelestial body to accelerate, kind of like a comet but without the dirty snowball epithets.

And then there was Dolly.

Those of you reading this in any part of NZ (except maybe Gore) are probably thinking about cloned sheep. Stop it. Start thinking about Jolene, 9 to 5, and Islands in the Stream.

Especially Islands in the Stream.

We reached Dolly Parton's Cleavage during one of the rare confluences in ride-line that had several of us in single-file, and were into the cleft and careening down the steepest of walls between the enormous, bulbous hillocks before we knew what we were getting ourselves into. Out the bottom end, and stopping just short of a precipitous precipice, we watched several of the others follow us in and then hiked back up for another run, which was little different save for a less-occluded sightline: slightly scary, great fun, and over way too quick**.

Plenty more slickrock playground to explore though, including another sloping wall traverse down to canyon bottom, with even better pot-holes and weather-rounded gullies to swoop through on the way, and then Don gave us an option: out-and-back on yet another canyon wall, or call time on the ride and haul out to the trailhead. No-one departed, despite the call of the ale.

The ride along that last canyon wall was the perfect finale for what had turned out to be my highlight ride of the week we spent in and around Moab. The absence of clearly-defined trail meant that people were riding the wall high and low, seeking valid pathways to onwardsness. There were times when we were able to look up the wall and see riders above, then turn and stare down towards the eventual steep drop-off and see others wall-crawling on the lower plane. Chopping from one line to another happened regularly, and opportunistically; every so often a ramp to a higher plane would manifest itself and be ridden; other times someone would ride a more-or-less vertical segment of wall to a lower line that had looked particularly tasty from above. Eventually we all coalesced at a sketchy foothole-pocked traverse around the end of a sheer-sided cleft, and the first few through were debating the relative merits of carrying on around the end of the looming point versus trying to find a way up the cap-rock bluffs to the summit when a flurry of activity burst forth, midway along the skinniest section of the traverse, where Lori was departing rapidly downslope. Thinking initially that it was the Weatherman, we stopped to take photographs, but once the true identity of the slider became known the rescue party formed quickly, efficiently, and, as it turned out, needlessly, as she extricated herself from her predicament with no more than a minor assist credit for Bob.

That signalled beer o'clock, but we had a long wall to ride to get back to fermented deliciousness. Having said that, the ride back along the face seemed to take far less time than the outbound journey, and only the overshoot-and-backtrack made it take as long as it did. And then dirt road, with sections of deep sand that Nene blitzed with style and grace and irritating ease. Then she and the Launderer forged ahead of the group, missed a turnoff, and did some bonus miles. Nene tried to claim bonus beer for having done the extra mileage, but the demand was disallowed on the dual grounds that: she's only little; and that lack of navigational ability should be punished, not rewarded. Mildly Grumpy Lovely Wife!







* = Petrified sandstone, we discovered somehow.

** = Insert sexually-oriented joke about the person of your choice here.

Lessons in Porcupinism

Short Version:
Some things we learned in Moab, a great ride on greater bikes, we shift house.

Long Version:
We'd been learning things from the Invermatons:
- A broken neck is not the end of riding. (Don)
- Laundry baskets are valid hiding places, but only if they're full of dirty laundry. (Mark)
- Another broken neck is still not the end of riding. (Don)
- Back of the hand = discipline; open palm = abuse. (The Viv of Destruction)
- It's easier to negotiate deep sand-traps on a bicycle if you're not a heffalump. (Christie, Lori, Gina and Nene, v Me, Steve19, and Cam)
- Willpower + grit + laughter = Anything is rideable (Sodium Chloride Viv)
- There's no accounting for taste. (Lori, Cindy, Viv19, Ann, Christie, Gina, Nene)
- Performing repairs on bicycles is made vastly more difficult when helpful people like me help. (Don)

We were a couple of weeks too late to run the Whole Enchilada; a 31-mile mainly downhill epic which drops from the now-snowed-under Burro Pass. Still, the main Porcupine Rim trail was open, and a short climb from our drop-off point (thanks Don!) saw us away laughing, chasing the main group's two-hour head-start on the fun but rough downhill to the Colorado River.

Don and Christie had decided that they'd earned a rest day, and had loaned us their super-awesome Ibis Mojo SL bicycles for the ride. Turns out they're not only SuperLight, but also SuperPlush ; we were floating up and down both steps and drops we'd've been fighting on our own bikes, with only our unwillingness to place such precious devices at risk slowing us on both climbs and descents. A couple of times Nene was negatively-impacted by my tortoise-like downhill progress; forced to slam on the wrong-way-around brakes in a hurry to avoid rear-ending me. I suffered most, though, when an attempted crawl down a series of steps that I'd normally have blasted through at pace led to what would have been a total face-plant had my elbow not been there to bear the brunt the landing. This, of course, occurred just after we caught the main group, so there were witnesses aplenty to my buffoonery.

There was some crazy terrain, with some washed-out sections of trail engendering huge rock-drops that some mad bugger rode, and that several untall women* navigated with generally endearing complaininess. We played leapfrog with a mad old man from Michigan, who was about seven feet tall and was wearing something which looked very much like the orange perspex face-shield section of Rebel Alliance pilot flight-helmets, and then we were off on the road-ride back into town where we stole internets, did laundry, and bought a wee thank-you gift for Don and Christie before heading out into the desert to their AirStream for dinner. Which was so delicious that we moved in next-door.







* = And Fucken Dave

Chores

While Nene got clean, I did chores.

1. Acquire Beer.
Here in Utah, supermarkets sell beer, but only the stuff that's 3.2% or less, which didn't sound particularly appealling. We'd been warned, and had brought a bunch of delicious beer with us, but we'd piled through it the night of the wind and rain and were pretty much out. The beer selection at the State Liquor Store was surprisingly comprehensive, and not-unreasonably-priced, and I wandered out with a double armload of anticipation, and on to the next stop.

2. Acquire Bike Parts.
Bearded Guy was not in situ at the Moab Cyclery, but Indian Guy was. He too picked up on the poverty/Scottish theme quickly, and sold me a nearly-new XT free-hub for half the price of a new one.
Sweet! Onwards.

3. Acquire Squeallessness
The squeal from the Reaper's wheel had reached intolerable proportions. The guys at the incredibly-busy Auto Repair place took a listen and a look and said: It's your brake pad squealer. Brake pads are getting thin. I can bend it out of the way if you like; that'll stop it making the noise.
Sweet!
Onwards.

4. Acquire Cleanliness.
My turn for a shower, and this time there was soap, and shampoo, and - joy of joys! - hot water.
Bliss.
Onwards, with Lovely Wife.

5. Acquire Delicious Foods.
Nene found all manner of delicious items, and misplaced me. I wandered, forlorn and lonely, for what felt like a long, long time before she rescued me and took me away from that horrible place.
Onwards.

6. Go to Pot-Luck Dinner Party. Behave in Civilized Manner.
There were literally tens of people in the house. Both of us were a little overwhelmed, from being inside a house as much as by sheer numbers of people. We ate delicious foods, drank delicious beer, and conversed with interesting people. We were sad to leave.

Not really a chore, that last one.

A Tiny Lizard, Basking in the Sun

Short Version:
BASE jumpers welcome us to another great ride. Bike death. A high-speed crash. Lovely Wife scares the Weatherman.

Long Version:
Amasa Back had been on the must-do ride list of everyone with whom we'd had Moab-riding discussions, and we arrived at the parking area full of piss and vinegar and ready for some serious ride action. BASE jumpers were cascading groundward from the nearby peaks as we pulled in, and we watched them carefully folding and packing away their gear as we breakfasted and had a crack at drying out the still-sodden tent and associated items whilst awaiting the arrival of our partners-in-ride for the day.

Don and Christie and Mark and Lori arrived within minutes of each other, and before we knew it we were off, riding up the road to the trailhead proper, then walking our bikes down the far-too-sketchy-for-that-hour-of-the-morning rock staircase to the bottom of the cliff, where Kane Creek burbled noisily across our path. A long but mainly gentle-grade climb punctuated by uneven rock sections brought us to a high plateau of slickrock, where we played competitive route-finder before lunching at the cliff-edge overlooking the potash manfactory and Dead Horse Point. Apparently parts of the original 2001: A Space Odyssey were filmed in the area, which fits well with the general otherworldliness of the terrain surrounding Moab.

Back down the sloping plateau and then onwards to our turning point at Pothole Arch. Mechanical failure impacted my enjoyment of the run back down to Kane Creek: my free-hub died, leaving me with the options of derailing my chain and coasting back or pedalling the whole way to avoid massive chain entanglement. I chose the latter, and discovered that pedalling down hills makes one go even faster, regardless of the terrain. Who knew? Scary stuff in some places, although not as scary as the realisation halfway down that we'd lost Lori.

We found her, eventually, back up the trail a ways, mildly battered and bruised, and bleeding impressively a little bit, and then we were off again, eating up the miles as we blasted downhill over the rocky terrain we'd ridden up a few hours earlier, to the creek where a tiny lizard basked in the sun. The Weatherman had arrived there well in advance of the rest of us and had set up to film us incoming at speed. He'd not banked on Nene's race-face and pace, though, and her high-speed and vehement arrival spooked him so much he fell over, down the bank, narrowly avoiding a bath in the creek at the bottom. Humour value: High.

Arches

Short Version:
Twisted, gnarled, contorted rocks. Squealing. Clean! (but only half in a good way)

Long Version:
The nice Ranger at the gate wasn't very good at shaving, and he told us that the water that had been dumped on our campsite overnight was, as we spoke, rushing towards the Park though a series of usually-dry gullies called washes. This meant that one of the Park's big drawcards, the Delicate Arch, was inaccessible until further notice. Rats.

Still, plenty more to see:
- The Three Gossips: Three towering towers of stone, looking for all the world like three people sharing illicit informations
- The Garden of Eden: Indescribably contorted stone formations
- The Windows: We breakfasted here, beneath these two enormous eye-like arches. Our exploratory hike up to Turret Arch was great, and Lovely Wife set the standard for being photographed with this type of stone feature by balancing on one leg and waving her arms around. My attempts to provide an equally-impressive spectacle at the North Window were thwarted by a) The fat Amerikan woman who followed me around like she had me tethered on one of those coiled spring-like leashes usually employed to restrain the wanderings of handbag dogs or small evil children and b) my inability to stand on one leg without falling over
- The Double Arch: The wind whipping through from the north meant we didn't spend as much time as we otherwise might have taking in the views in both directions from this extraordinary combination of horizontal and vertical spans
- Salt Valley: Crazy-looking place which - unsurprisingly - reminded us of Dominion Salt at the Mount (Hi Dominion Salt!)
- The Devil's Garden: Here we spent several hours, hiking up through a valley surrounded on all sides by twisted and gnarled rocks. We saw the enormous Landscape Arch, but only from a distance, as it has a tendency to become larger every so often by shedding big chunks of its rocky self. Partition Arch was our definite highlight, with major and minor windows providing amazing views out over yet more strange rock forms. Double O Arch was very cool also, although the crow that was performing aerobatic trickery through the gaps refused to do so when the camera was out. Bastardo.
We hiked back to the Reaper via the Primitive Trail, which was a little-used cairn-marked trail through the desert, from which we managed to lose ourselves mildly a couple of times. At one point we found ourselves walking down a steep face of slickrock, and Lovely Wife discovered the hard way that not only were my hiking boots better at gripping the stuff than her offroad running shoes, but also that said shoes provide more grip on said rock when the soles are not caked with sand.

The Reaper's wheel squeal was louder and more insistent on the drive into town, so we had a drink with the Invermerans to dull our senses. Just as well we did, because when we stole showers at the fancypants campground they were inhabiting, there was no hot water forthcoming from the spigot in the shower stall I'd selected, which combined nicely with the lack of soap, shampoo, or conditioner in my toiletries bag to form an overall shower experience which fell somewhat short of expectations. Luckily, Lovely Wife had been able to luxuriate in boundless hot water over on the so-called Ladies' side of the ablutions block, so one of us, at least, was happy and pleasant-smelling as we drove, wheel squealing all the way, out past the cliff-hanging roadside campspot of our first Moab night and down into the tortuously-convoluted Hunter Canyon below, where we camped illicitly near where the road fords the river, rising early to make ourselves scarce before any relevant authorities put in an appearance.

Storm in the Desert, Part II: The Same, Only Different

Short Version:
A light shower, and a cool breeze.

Long Version:
Once again, we were glad we'd moved into the comparative safety of the Reaper before falling asleep. This time, though, it wasn't cacophonous thunder or blinding and noisy bolts of lightning thrashing the ground nearby; this time the deafening noise was provided by the torrential downpour smashing onto the roof of the Reaper as though it were trying to break through the metal to get to us, and this time it didn't stop after a short barrage but carried on for much of the night. The volume of water that was dumped on us must have been huge. It wasw the wind, though, that was our real nemesis that night; the van was rocking (and not because of activity inside it) and we actually heard the tent leaving in the dark.

It wasn't terrifying the way the oh-so-close electrical death of the previous night's weather attack had been, but we were both well and truly concerned about the likely state of the road, which already had some wheel-, if not van-eating mud pits along the several miles of dirt separating us from the highway. And we had no idea how long it was going to take us to find the tent. And it was still raining, albeit with far less outright brutality than it had exhibited throughout most of the night.

Turns out we didn't have to go far to retrieve the tent: the bulk of it had stayed put, with only the fly making a concerted break for freedom, and it had been thwarted by one of the few small scraggly trees in the vicinity, which had snarled the fleeing material on its gnarled and twisted branches. We had more difficulty trying to reduce the amount of water we were going to be dragging around with us: the tent had a good four inches trapped inside, and there was more in every crevice and fold in each of the tarpaulins we'd used to cover the bikes in a futile attempt to keep them relatively dry. And it was still raining.

So we shed as much water as we could, bundled the wet gear up and stowed it in quarantinable plastic bins, and made a run for it, on the grounds that the road out wasn't going to get any better unless we were prepared to sit tight for a day or two. Which we weren't, despite both of us being incredibly patient people.

We passed the worst mud pit without realising it, and were rolling effortlessly through the puddle on the far side of the second one before either of us dared voice our growing suspicions:
- Um... shouldn't we have hit the mud by now?
- I think that was the it, back there
- But there wasn't any mud
- Maybe the rain washed it all away
- I think you're right
- I think you look like a monkey
- I think you smell like a monkey
- I think we both do
- I think you're right
- Shall we go explore the nearby Arches National Park, with its many incredible wind- and water-sculpted sandstone features?
- Yes, let's

A Norwegian in the Desert

Short Version:
We didn't die! Awesome! We drive for a long time to go a short distance, then ride the breakaway on the Sovereign. Beer. Burritos. Beer. Olive oil. Wind. Wind? Wind.

Long Version:
Sunrise in the desert was beautiful, and the day started to shape as bright and sunny, and with little evidence of the ferocity of the overnight hostilities. We rewarded ourselves for surviving the night with eggy burritos, and then set off up the claggier-than-before dirt road to meet the Invermeerkats in town so we could all go ride somewhere in the desert. They were leaving town as we arrived, and we followed them, convoy-style, as they drove out of town, northwards, back along the route on which we'd come in. We laughed, and talked merrily of how humorous it would be if we ended up back out where we'd started.

Right up to the point where we arrived back at where we'd started, 40-odd miles after we'd set off.

Then we laughed some more, because we didn't die overnight, and we'd had eggy burritos for breakfast, and we were about to go ride our bikes with people we liked, and all of those things are excellent.

The first three of our vehicles to arrive at the Sovereign Trail parking area doubled the number present. The next six doubled it again. There were bikes and people everywhere; not only those who'd ridden the Slickrock Trail the day before, but a bunch of others too, some of whom - like Fucken Dave and his surprisingly lovely partner Cindy - had arrived in town overnight. Having spent a good part of the past five months as an isolated pair, it was a wee bit overwhelming to find ourselves amidst such numbers. Before long, though, we found ourselves haring off up the trail, part of a breakaway group comprising the two of us, Mark and Lori, and another couple, Don and Christie (Hi Mark and Lori and Don and Christie!).

The trail was a mix of slickrock, dirt, and mud made from fine red dust, and the Norwegian we dragged around the place for much of the ride was loving it. There was little major up or down, although there were a couple of good tests thrown in there, including one steep, switchbacked section that we all rode repeatedly and in both directions whilst awaiting the arrival of the main group.

Post-ride festivities back at the vehicles included minor beerage for most, but Nene and I were minutes from "home," so felt free to indulge more heavily than usual, drinking a bottle each of delicious rich dark porter while chaos raged all around us. Fucken Dave's breasts were the undisputed stars of the show, although word is that some of the Macarena dancing was also pretty spectacular.

Lovely Wife and I carried on once back at camp, with another delicious dark concoction or three downed alongside delicious bean burritos. Then Nene spilled quarter of a bottle of olive oil in the bed, and the wind started to pick up, and we looked at the sky and thought: Goodness gracious! Surely this can't be happening again!

...and Then the World Exploded

Short Version:
Delicious foods, tasty beer, a spot in the sun. The Weatherman is proved right, and then some! Wake up, time to die.

Long Version:
Delicious foods*, tasty beer**, and a warm spot in the last of the sunlight, with a spectacular view of the lightning playing in and around the distant cloudbanks to the south and the east. We'd had "Bad weather's a-comin," warnings from some yokel with a Weather Channel addiction, but figured it had gone around us as we sat in our deckchairs watching the two separate lightshows.

Then, without warning, we were wet.

As we'd watched the horizons to the south and the east, another storm had snuck in from the north and opened up a biblical deluge right over us. We calmly discussed the situation, and figured that this maybe meant that we should forego the tent-sleep experience, so we unhurriedly housed the bikes and other hardy items under canvas and threw ourselves into the Reaper, which was reverberating under the hammer-blows of rain like nothing we'd ever experienced. Conversation was impossible.

And then it was silent. Absolute sound-vacuum. We opened the rear doors cautiously, and heard the sound of the rain smashing into the dirt diminishing as the open cloud moved away southwards across the plain at high speed. The lightning was still flashing tinily in the distance, and we sat and watched with the rear doors open, stunned by the sudden onslaught and equally swift cessation of hostilities.

Then the world exploded.

The blackness of the desert night was all of a sudden replaced by the brightest, whitest light, and the silence was not so much broken as shattered, hugely and rudely and all-encompassingly, by the sound of every firework you've ever heard all going off at once, combined with the noise that would be made if all the lions and tigers and bears that have ever walked the earth were somehow yelling their displeasure in unison. We were blinded, and deafened, and damn near soiling our britches.

It was incredible.

And it went on and on and on; first the light disappeared, leaving everything in absolute darkness while the thunder rolled on and on in the void. Then the noise also ceased, leaving us breathless and shaken, ears ringing in the sudden silence. A pause, long enough for brains to reboot, and for thoughts to occur. Thoughts like: "Should we really be sitting inside a big metal box which is the tallest thing on this flat, largely featureless plain of dirt, while lightning of that magnitude strikes with such vehemence and overwhelming force so close by?" And then the world was gone agin, replaced by the light and the sound and the shitting of bricks.

After what seemed like forever, the barrage wandered off south in pursuit of the rain that had foreshadowed its onslaught, and watching it once again became a spectator sport instead of a futile gesture towards meeting one's end relatively bravely and with eyes open***. Tiny fires were being kindled and dying on ever-more-distant hilltops, and eventually the adrenaline subsided enough for us to drift off to sleep.










* = Corn chips with salsa made from a can of Western Family brand Mexican Tomatoes (with Lime Juice and Cilantro). The juice from this tin was delicious, and, we suspect, would mix really really well with vodka to produce one of the yummiest intoxicants imaginable

** = Ninkasi Brewery's Tricerahops. Nom nom nom nom nom****

*** = Wincing doesn't count as closing them, does it?

**** = In the "Ingesting something delicious" sense, not the stupid French people "Without" meaning

Honey, hold my beer while I drive up this wall

Short Version:
We look into the abyss, then meet some old mad friends. Repairs. Cleverness. We ride Slickrock

Long Version:
We got up early, that first day in Moab, in an attempt to not be busted camping somewhere illegal by whatever authorities are authoritarian in this neck of the woods. When we clambered out of the Reaper into the chill morning light we discovered that we'd been sleeping at the edge of a precipice which dropped away a long way into a sheer-sided canyon, to a muddy river far below. The cliffs on the far side rose massively into the sky, and when we turned away from the drop we saw similar red rock walls looming hugely across the road as well. Strangely-shaped rock was everywhere; some carved into smooth twisted shapes by wind and water, other areas jagged and sharp after cataclysmic breakages.

It felt like it had been an age since we'd exchanged more than transactional pleasantries with anyone other than each other, but when we counted back it had only been two-and-a-half days since we'd left Lisa and Tim and Desiree in Pocatello (Hi Lisa and Tim and Desiree!). Even so, it was nice to meet the Invermere folks in town, and doing so meant that Lovely Wife had someone just as mad as her to ride with, up the steep hill to Sand Flats County Park and onto arguably the most famous mountain-bike trail in the world: Slickrock. I, of course, was at the bike shop, having the repairs I'd carried out on my bike that morning repaired by a chap whose beard was just like mine, only with less blonde bits. While he undid my repair we discussed dirtbag camping possibilities in the area, and as he fixed the original issue he gave me directions to local thrift stores. I guess he picked up on the poverty theme, as he levied no charge for the time and effort he'd spent, and sent me on my way with a beardy smile and a cheery "Have Fun - you're going to love it!" Thanks, Bearded Guy @ Moab Cyclery!

Unlike Nene and Mark and Lori (Hi Mark and Lori!), I'm not entirely nuts, and so drove up the hill to the park gate. When I arrived, though, I found a queue of traffic, and a sign enumerating the entry charges for various types of vehicle. Being far cleverer than everyone else, I turned around and drove back down the road a wee ways to a trailhead parking area I'd spied on the way up, secured the Reaper, and set off on my now-functional bike. I breezed past cars and trucks and massive RVs as I bypassed the queue of motorized vehicles, and was feeling ever-so-slightly smug as I reached the gate and the tollbooth... where the chap stopped me and levied the $2 bike entry fee. Bastardo.

Still, $2 is better than $5, and by the time I reached the Slickrock trailhead I was back to a state of happy expectation. I was mildly bemused to see motorcycles heading in on the same trail that I was aiming at, but I passed them pretty quickly and set off as fast as my little legs could drive me, following the white dashes painted on the rock. And rock it was, in all directions; gnarled and twisted and mounded into hummocks and ledges, ridged and curved and spectacular. And grippy. Slightly lower-than-normal tyre pressures had been recommended, and proved their worth from the get-go, clinging to even the most sheer rock face like each of the tyre's knobs had a wee suction cup on it. A couple of times, the painted line went straight up something obviously unrideable, all of which proved to be entirely rideable when made of slickrock. Except the one that was too steep right at the top for my legs to power me up. That was when I discovered firsthand something I'd been warned about: slickrock is really grippy for tyres, but not so grippy for shoes. I left several square inches of skin on that rock face.

Blood was still emanating from my elbow when I caught up to the group - and what a group it was! Some sixteen riders, parked in a cave eating foods. There were some familiar faces and some new ones, but little time to try to match names to them as we were off and rolling across yet more grippy slickrock, to the base of a blimmin steep hill, where folks took turns having a crack at riding up. Cam and Steve19 both blasted up it without issue, but for the rest of us it proved a bigger challenge. I left an even bigger patch of skin behind on the rocks halfway up, and bled bright orange from my ravaged knee for the rest of the ride. Could have been worse, though - Marianne fell off her bike and landed buttocks-first in a cactus grove just before lunch, earning herself the nickname Prickles and the loan of a pair of spike-free pants for the remainder of the ride. The scenery was phenomenal, and it seemed like every turn we made brought a new and equally stunning vista into view. The riding was just as good, with short, steep climbs and descents, step-ups and drop-offs, and everything rideable thanks to the rubber-hugging properties of the rock. Viv19 was climbing everything in sight, right up until the group started watching her, at which point she took a leaf out of Dick's book and fell off, although unlike him she pulled her feet free before hitting the rock. All on film, too, of course.

The trail runs through an area used by motorized offroad vehicles, and there were queues of the stinky beasts visible atop ridges in the distance, awaiting their run at some stupidly-steep obstacle or other ("Honey, hold my beer while I drive up this wall"). The motorcycles I'd passed near the start had caught up, and we'd been playing trail leapfrog with them for much of the ride. Apart from the guy who looked like an accountant on casual Friday, they were fully-geared-up, with body armor and full-face helmets. Not like the guy who came flying in from one side, helmetless and oh-so suave, launching himself off rock after rock, flying through the air on his massive machine as though both he and it were weightless, and coming very close to collecting one of the other motorcyclists as he flew by. At face-height. Scary, crazy, dangerous, impressive arseholery.

The ride, for those who'd set off together, had taken five hours, of which just two were spent riding. A wee bit different from what we've become accustomed to! Riding with a group that large meant that we'd each had totally different conversations with totally different people, so we were chattering away merrily as we drove out into the desert, interrupted briefly by a hail version of a sunshower and by a section of dirt road which was six-inch-deep claggy mud, and which threatened to have us entrapped for the night in a spot not of our choosing. Reaper power dismissed the challenge summarily, though, and we found ourselves a campsite near a junction, away from the large clumps of weekender ATV folks, and set up the tent for the first time since the night the large critter in the woods near Mt Hood scared us into the Reaper, all the way back in July.

Smoot

Short Version:
A long drive. A bland ride. Mooses! Moab in the dark.

Long Version:
We arose in fog and left Yellowstone without seeing much more than the inside of a cloud. The sun was shining on neighboring Grand Teton National Park, though, and delicious eggy burrito brunch at String Lake was accompanied by phenomenal views of serious mountainage. We stopped in Jackson, Wyoming, to have our picture taken with the arches made of antlers, then drove on, through Alpine, and Cokeville, and Smoot. Cokeville should really be renamed Roadkillville; we saw the carcasses of two deer, two raccoons, one cow, and a really stinky skunk, all right on the edge of town.

A quick stop at the Fossil Butte National Monument made us more smarter; who knew that owls and ducks were such ancient species? We took a hike up to the old fossil quarry and looked at rocks and petrified critters, then carried on south and west into Evanston, where we found a huge liquor store with huge bottles of delicious beers, several huge gas stations with huge pickup trucks at the pumps, and a huge Wal-Mart with huge customers inside. Then we made a run for the "nearby" Wasatch National Forest. It took a long time to get there, and by the time we reached it we were in Utah. The full moon was shining on high desert tablelands, and it gave us just enough light to twice narrowly avoid high-speed collisions with road-grazing deer.

Next morning dawned cloudy and cold, and it got colder as we went higher; up past Ruth Lake and over the 10347ft Bald Mountain Pass before dropping down into Park City, which hosted the alpine events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. We hit a bike shop for info and wandered out again with a free copy of a not-free map, which proved mighty handy during the two-and-a-half hour ride that followed. The haul up the Spiro Trail was pretty good, for a climb, although either the cold or the altitude or both had our lungs burning unpleasantly. The traverse along the Mid-Mountain Trail was underwhelming, partly due to gearing issues, and the descent back down into town was rescued from being borderline arse only by the close encounter with the cow and calf moose, which was kind of cool.

We left town after a minor stop for delicious foods, and made our way to the university town of Provo, where we browsed an enormous thrift store with minor success before hitting the road to the mountain-biking Mecca that is Moab. The driving got pretty tough, with torrential rain and strobe-like lightning making life difficult on the cats-eye-free highways, but we made it to and through town eventually, and out to the muddy dirt of Kane Creek Road, where all the campgrounds were full and we ended up sleeping surprisingly well in a pullout at the side of the road near the top of a steep hill.