eLIFELIST.com Bike Trip

August 10th – Day 42

Porcupine Rim!

We have reached the point of the trip where we will be taking a break from the daily biking and expanding the things we do on the trip by actually riding in a car for several days. After biking to Monticello, UT, we locked away the bikes and trailers in a guy’s shed that we found who was nice enough to let us store them for several days. So the first stop of stage 2 of the trip is Moab, UT.

After a short ride(50 miles) North, not on a bike, we arrived to check off another item from both of our lists, mountain bike Moab. Mountain biking in Moab is kind of like the Mecca of this sport and neither one of us had really biked West of the Mississippi, so we were both excited to finally have a chance to do this. We knew it was going to be extremely different than the biking we were used to, which turned out to be REALLY different than what we were both used to.

We signed on to go for a tour on the Porcupine Rim trail with the Chile Pepper Bike company since our touring bikes wouldn’t exactly cut it out here. Porcupine Rim is one of the more popular rides in the area, though not for the faint of heart. It is a pretty technical trail with the last 3 miles being all single-track down the side of a canyon wall, with not too much room for error. We got a couple sweet Cannonade Prophet dual-suspension bikes that we were ready to give a punishment to. The punishment turned out to be not just on the bikes today, but more so on the people riding them. It began with a 3 mile climb up wide rocky ledges that took us a little while to get the hang of climbing these ledges. After the climbing, the following description of the trail didn’t come from me, rather I took it straight from the Utah Mountain Biking site so it can properly be described by a ‘professional’…

“The real ride begins at the Rim. This is primo downhill advanced technical stuff, dropping off a gazillion small rocky ledges, with the last 3 miles a hairy single-track on the edge of deadly cliffs. From the Rim, you'll drop 2,700 vertical feet to the Colorado River over 11 unforgettable miles.

Once we reached the top of the climb, we had an amazing view of Castle Valley and really took a moment to soak it all in. After a few miles of the downhill and both of our confidences and speeds were rising, I took my first big spill of the day. I was riding on the left side of the trail gaining speed over some of the ledges, must have picked a bad line and shot myself off the trail into a nice tree/bush. After accessing the damage from the spill, the bike was fine(very important) but I had taken a few bruises. What I thought was my biggest injury, a sprained thumb, turned out not to be the worst of it. I must have decided that I wanted to take a souvenir home from the rim because I had somehow lodged a piece of the tree/bush into my calf, which I was not able to fully remove with the tweezers and knife we had with us after plenty of digging around. So we kept riding, having a great time, while taking several more beatings along the way.

While riding behind Lee, I came across him a couple of times with him laying face down on the rock with his bike several feet away, moaning. Lee got pretty banged up too with his worst injury coming less than 150 yards from the end of the trail. The last mile got extremely technical and we won’t lie, we had to walk several of the drops that at this point didn’t think even a professional mountain biker could ride cleanly. We were assured that it was feasible, but at least not for us in our beat up state.

Once we finished an extremely fun day’s ride we were done… We had plenty of bruises, cuts, and scrapes and knew that we were going to be walking around like old men for the rest of the day and tomorrow. After a brief lunch, I got a ride to the local clinic to get the ‘souvenir’ removed from my leg so it didn’t get infected. They had to do a bit of cutting since it was really lodged in there, but eventually pulled this guy out.

Porcupine Rim was really a different riding experience for both of us and we picked up several new skills to apply to our next ride, but it really beat us up pretty good. We would both totally do it again tomorrow, if we weren’t so sore…


-Brent

Absolutely "Colorful Colorado"

Montrose to Telluride

After seeing the Black Canyon and a good ride from Gunnison to Montrose we had some dinner at Chili’s and then moved on to find the campground in Montrose.  We were moving quickly to set up before the rain, we have become experts at setting up our camp in 5 minutes before the rain can get there.  Like clockwork, not 10 minutes after we had set up camp the rain began and stayed the whole night while we in Montrose.  Our tents held up well against the downpours.  

A little background on this campground, Belinda a former truck driver runs the park and lives in one of the RV’s that is perminantly parked there.  She told us stories of how the campground “used” to gave drug dealers and be kind of unsafe but that she had really cleaned it up and had her 12 gauge to back it up.  We felt good about that.  We woke up to pouring rain again the morning we were biking to Telluride, so we packed up our wet gear and hit the road.  

We had one good climb over “Dallas Divide” and went through some nasty road construction heading into Telluride.  The three mile detour off our route to Telluride was more than worth it.  Telluride is just about the most ideal “Ski Town” imaginable.  We camped in the city park right by a river and had a gorgeous view of Telluride Peak.  We set up our tents hoping to dry them out a bit and then the rain came again.  After the rain passed we headed to town for some dinner at the Cornerhouse.  After thoroughly stuffing ourselves we grabbed a drink at a local bar and then headed back to the campsite.  We ended a great day of riding with cigars by the river, accompanied by some lightening looming far off in the distance.  Going to bed we braced ourselves for another night of rainstorms.  If you can ever go to Telluride, do, great place.  

August 5th – Day 36

Monarch Pass!

After looking at this pass for the past week on the map, we were fully prepared to kick it in the butt. We were expecting the worst and it actually turned out to be fairly easy. Yes, it was high and long, but it really was not too steep. So we just had our bikes in a low gear and methodically cranked it out while really only taking one break for the entire morning. We both thought that the climbs in the Smokey’s were much tougher. It could be because we think that they are graded higher or it could be that we have been biking now straight for over a month. Most likely it is a combination of both. Regardless, we made it up to the top when this jeep could not. We were passed by a huge number of motorcycles on our way up, which at our one stop for the day came to find out was the BMW club having their annual 100,000 ft of climbing ride. There were 330 bikes that would do over 350 miles of riding and 100,000 ft of ascent and descent in just one day. Oh, it must be nice to have a motorized vehicle.

Unfortunately the traffic camera on top of the mountain did not quite work out like we had planned. We were not smarter than the camera, and it did not update every 10 minutes like we had thought, but pretty much whenever it felt like it. We have heard from several people that there was a sighting of our bikes and trailers there, but not us. What also didn’t help was that there was no cell phone coverage for either of us up there. Trust us, we did make it up and hopefully this picture can support our claim.

Our weather for the climb up was great, which helped to make it easier, though was a completely different story on the way down. After about two minutes of flying down the other side of the mountain, it decided to hail on us, which made for an extremely cold ride down. This weather pattern was not limited to just our descent, but turned out to be a continual rain for the next 40 miles…awesome. Despite our best efforts to stay dry, we were both soaked and didn’t really feel like setting up our tents in the rain. Once we rolled into our final town of the day, Gunnison, we decided to spring for a motel room to try and dry up all of our gear. We quickly realized that Gunnison was booming this night and not one room was available in the whole town, which included about 15 hotels/motels. What reason could possibly explain such a shortage of rooms? The monster truck rally was in town….

Anyway, while we were trying to decide what to do for the night in the check in of the Super 8 Motel, we were fortunate enough to run into Dan. Dan worked at the motel and offered for us to stay at his place for the night if nothing turned up. He worked at the motel part time and also in Crested Butte, where he is able to get in 100 days of skiing a year. His flexible schedule allows him to do what he really enjoys, which is spend time in the outdoors. After only a few days in Colorado, we are both really blown away by the relaxed attitudes and passion Coloradoans have for the outdoors. We have both been to the state before, but never quite experienced it like this.

Dan is a very intense back country hiker and has already climbed 32 of the 54 14ers in Colorado in just two and a half years, which is very impressive. He turned out to be a very nice, laid back guy, who was nice enough to offer us a place to stay for the night in his trailer.

We roamed around Gunnison, had a great dinner at Katie's Kookery with live music, and enjoyed some beverages at a local bar. Gunnison quickly rose to be one of our favorite places so far on the trip. It is a great little mountain town.

 Day 35 – August 4th

After enough messing around with relaxation, it was time to conquer these Rockies. The flatness was over and we began our ascent by visiting the Royal Gorge. We quickly remembered what it felt like to climb and put some strain back on the legs, but we were ready to buck whatever came our way. The Royal Gorge Bridge is the highest suspension bridge in the world, which is over 1000 ft above the Arkansas River. It is also almost like a high country Disneyland with all of the tourist activities they had there. The only thing they were missing was a giant walking gorge mascot to greet everyone in the park. To us the park really just seemed like a very high, expensive, toll bridge. We were not about to not pay for it and have to double back a whole lot of miles that we didn’t have to.

It was tempting to drop a fishing line down below and see what was biting, but they specifically prohibited it. It was pretty amazing to see such a huge gorge cut out from this river and all of these mini mountains in the distance after so long of seeing nothingness.

After the gorge we were determined to make it to a town fairly close to the base of Monarch Pass so we could get right into it in the morning without too much messing around. What we didn’t realize was how beautiful the ride to this town would be. We rode through Bighorn Sheep Canyon and had huge steep mountains on each side of us with the Arkansas River flowing right next to us. It really was one of the prettiest stretches that we have done up to this point and made for such a great ride.

One thing we didn’t really realize was how unpredictable the weather was going to be in the mountains. It seemed like the storms change their mind every other minute and will dump on you whenever they please. After a quick lunch we found ourselves racing away/towards/into/behind, well who knows, but close to a storm that was pretty hairy. We didn’t want to stop since we didn’t know what it was doing, plus we didn’t know where we would go if we stopped, plus we had to make it to Howard, which was our campsite for the night. After very frantic we-don’t-want-to-die riding and several close, I mean make you jump out of your seat close, lighting bolts we finally made it to the campsite , and set up our tents just in the nick of time before the serious rain started. Nothing like the sound of rain on the outside of your tent to help you get a good nights rest for a morning full of intense climbing…

-Brent

This is the dog we chased around.