With my bike picked up, we were off to find some relatively easy singletrack to test gear on – also, I was a bit rusty as far as singletrack went.  Alex & Megan had recently (a week before) received a Tout Terrain Singletrack trailer for towing Finn on singletrack.  With it being single-wheeled, cushioned by Rock Shox & quite narrow it enables towing a child on rougher terrain than a lot of/all other trailers.  Finn wasn’t too happy usually to be put in it, but once the bike was moving he was content to look around at everything and occasionally go to sleep.  Anyway, this new acquisition needed proving and our bikes needed a shake-down – so we headed to the family friendly MOAB Brand trails.

With so much riding over ten days, hopefully my ride reports won’t be as verbose usual as all the riding bliss blends into one big happy memory; rather they should be photo heavy as the scenery was spectacular and there were others carrying cameras for a change.  Credit for most photos of me will go to Megan or Alex, as will some of the better landscapes – as it’s rare for me to find good riding photos of me & their panoramas are better than mine.

Alex getting used to the Tout

We pottered around a bit on the pretty easy trails enjoying being out on bikes in Moab (!) for a few hours.

Follow the line, there’s plenty of rock to get lost on. Clearly not that warm, as I wasn’t regretting the bike trousers

After our first little ride, it was off to set up camp above town in the Sand Flats area (close to the world famous Slickrock trail). As the cold weather seemed to have scared everyone else off too, we had our pick of the campsites. We settled on the first one we looked at – it had grand views of the La Sal mountains, a big rock for Finn to climb and was set well back from the parking lot. I was greeted with resounding laughter as I carried two suitcases in across all the sand – I maintain it was the most practical option of getting so much riding paraphernalia across the world.

It didn’t look too bad at night either – not Montana, I know, but big skies all the same

I rather optimistically declared, not factoring in spring weather, my intention to ride twice each of the ten days – one family ride, one harder/more technical. With not much of the day left, Alex & I headed to the base of the ridge on the other side of town ride Pipe Dream (Megan had scoped this out for us the day before, itching to go for a run after days cooped up in the car from Alberta). Close to town, it’s a relatively short trail that packs in a lot of up & down with plenty of technical challenges – mostly involving balancing. I was pretty happy to only dab (put my foot down while trying to ride) once.

Across the south end of town to the La Sals

Alex trying not to sneeze too hard, lest it all comes down