MOAB, UT Mountain Biking

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

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