Our mountain bike ride began in a thunderstorm as we descended 1,100 feet on the Shafer Trail. The guidebook describes the switchbacks as "dangerous or impassible when wet." Though cold and mud splattered, we evaded the instant waterfalls pouring off stone ledges. We made all the sharp turns but brake pads thinned rapidly. At the bottom of this initial trail, faithful Dave had set up a soup kitchen in the support vehicle. I tried to shake the cold by draping myself across the still warm car engine. Then we headed out ten more miles to set up our first camp site. So began day one of our ride on the White Rim Trail in Moab, Utah.
We were on a 92 mile, three and a half day mountain bike trip, riding across one of the earth's most spectacular landscapes...the series of deep, arid canyons whose deep formation go back 280 million years. These canyons follow the course of the Colorado and Green Rivers which join just below the White Rim Trail. Once joined, they move as one to carve out the Grand Canyon further south.
The scale of the landscape creates miniatures of our selves and bikes and tents. As in "Can you find the biker in the picture below?" Or " Find Bob standing on the rock rim" or "See the group of bikers resting on day two of the ride."
There they are!
The white rim rocks reveal another scale. Here the occassional downpours form small pools. The wind and water push soil into shallow hollows. Here plants take root and form diverse desert colonies of goosefoot (once collected for their edible seeds), yucca, saltbush, and Indian ricegrass. So the trail exists on both a macro and a micro scale...the latter being harder to find but just as satisfying as the depths and distances of the canyons and mountains beyond.
And then the human scale. The trip was organized by the PEDAL club of Loveland, CO on a volunteer basis (the chief volunteers being Ed and Dave....Dave the cook, support vehicle driver, chief transport official, water and snack supplier, and general bon vivant and Ed the chief financial and administrative officer). Eight cyclists (some occasionally falling off their bikes and some more commonly pushing their bikes up hardscrabble hills) followed the jeep trail made by ranchers and uranium miners.
So the joy was to be in this landscape with friends who cared about each other's welfare and who experienced this wide space in his or her own way. So we rode the final miles to the edge of the Green River, camped for a final night at Potato Bottom (oh, the ice on the tent on the cold, damp last morning), and rode (or pushed) up 1,000 feet of switchbacks back to the top of the mesa.
We shared the long car ride back to Loveland and Fort Collins, bikes strapped to the back of our SUVs, our heads filled with memories of these vast lands and the beginnings of plans for our return.
