Category Archives: bikes

bikes, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, travel, USA

Gooseberry Mesa – ’tis but a scratch

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Coming highly recommended from a few sources, Gooseberry Mesa was the ride for the our last morning in Hurricane. I left Valerie early & headed east out of town on Highway 89. It’s not the easiest place to find, but is signposted now. Off the highway there is quite a few miles of driving on dirt roads of widely varying quality before you reach the trailhead.

I started off with the South Rim trail. At only 5.5 miles, it’s not a particularly long way to the lookout point at the end of the mesa. It is however quite technical & slow. I’ve seen Gooseberry Mesa compared to the famous Slickrock trail in Moab that I rode less than two weeks ago. I think that is stretching it a bit far. There is very little elevation change on Gooseberry; while this makes it easier aerobically, it does mean you get very few prolonged descents. There is also a lot more riding through trees at Gooseberry & so there is not as much slickrock riding. You do need some short bursts of extra strength & balance to clear a few very sharp rises. I was getting most of these, but things went a bit pear shaped on one long & steep rise – I didn’t quite have enough strength, stopped, jumped out of my pedals backwards, lost my footing & ended up sitting on the rock. My bike came to meet me & the handlebar sconed my upper cheek bone. This drew a bit of blood, but not enough to stop me.

Near the end of the South Rim trail, you do ride really quite close to the rim at times – it’s a long way down. The views are of course good. I headed out to the point for a good lookout over the Virgin River valley. Heading back along the North Rim trail was noticeably quicker & this was easier to ride – which was just as well, as with the forty-five minute drive back to Hurricane it was getting rather close to check-out time. Back at the car & hurriedly packing up, I managed to get back to Hurricane in half an hour – in time to clean up my wounds, Valerie to pack the car & we hit the road for Vegas.

We stopped in the rather nice small town of St George, as I had intended to do another short little ride – but when it came down to it, I couldn’t be bothered going out for a ride in the early afternoon heat. We moseyed around town & somehow managed to get on two free tours of historic houses. It turned out that one was the winter house of an important Mormon prophet in the nineteenth century & the other was an older house of another Mormon. As Valerie said, they’re everywhere around here. The houses were nice, especially the exterior & grounds of the winter house – but I liked all the history, particularly those bits about the settling of the west.

Our short stretch back on I-15 had us dropping off the Colorado Plateau alongside the Virgin River & crossing the Mojave Desert & we’re just hitting the outskirts of that crazy place – Las Vegas.

bikes, GPS, MTB, national park, roadtrip, travel, USA

Zion & JEM

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My favourite National Park from my last visit to the States, I just had to go back & show Valerie Zion. Kept awake for most of the wee hours, I was decidedly slow & not really in the mood for walking around in the sun. But after not having been long in Zion, the beauty of the place & then seeing a woman with a stump for a left arm & no right arm at all snapped me out of that. I still love Zion – there’s something about being at the bottom of that canyon with such sheer & red walls. We did pretty much the same things I did on my last visit, with perhaps one extra short walk. For the first time on this trip, I wished I was traveling with someone who would be keen for a big back-country hike (there were a few groups around starting/finishing) – not a lot of Zion is easily accessible, hiking is one of the few ways to get out & see more of the park away from the canyon. I tried to spend more time appreciating the scenery & not taking photos – I think I succeeded in this, but still ended up with a lot of pictures.

The Virgin River was running quite high – couldn’t walk up to The Needles

These thistles were bigger than I was – just as well the bees weren’t.

Back in Hurricane in the prevening, I set out to ride the Gould’s Rim/JEM Trail/Hurricane Rim loop again. It was a blast & I whipped out the 33 km in just over two hours of riding (less than 2.5 total) – so quite pleased with that as there was over 600 m of climbing as well (mostly a big hill at the start & then riding around the rim at the end). I also managed to cut out about the extra seven kilometres I did last time when the trail wasn’t marked very well. It started off overcast, but the setting sun dipped below the clouds – with the light breeze it made for very pleasant riding conditions. I shared the trail with a lot of chipmunks & lizards again – also a lot of nice flowers out as I whipped down the JEM trail (that’s always a pleasure, fast flowing singletrack that gets rocky & more technical in an instant).

Gooseberry Mesa – would be riding up there two days later


bikes, GPS, MTB, national park, roadtrip, travel, USA

Grand Canyon North Rim & Rainbow Rim Trail

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It was with great pleasure that I awoke to a lack of sound from the wind chimes – things were a lot calmer than yesterday.  We left town by 8.30 & headed west back into Utah briefly before dropping south back into Arizona & towards Grand Canyon North Rim.  Once we hit the small town of Fredonia I was back on roads I’d traveled before – the first time since Bragg Creek almost four weeks ago.  After a brief stop at Jacob Lake for me to get a forest road map & Valerie to buy more souvenirs, we were driving through the Kaibab Meadows.  It must have been cold there last night – there was still some fresh snow that hadn’t melted just yet, seems I can’t get away from the stuff.  With the long winter, all the spring growth was not completed & the meadows weren’t quite as pretty as last time I drove through – but they are a still a magnificent sight.

We didn’t stop too long at the rim, maybe an hour, to get a good view of various parts of the canyon.  The sky was wonderfully clear all the way down to the horizon & this enabled us to see some of the mountains a hundred-odd kilometres away – I don’t think I saw these last time.

We drove out of the park & soon after turned onto Forest Development Road 22, continuing on for about 22 miles & 40 minutes to the Parissawampitts (I don’t know how to pronounce it either – I prefer Paris-saw-armpits) trailhead so I could get a ride in.

I was most excited to be riding along the rim of the Grand Canyon on good singletrack.  The trail in its entirety is almost 29 km to the Timp trailhead.  It forms a sawtooth route (roughly) to keep on a reasonably similar level by following all the little side canyons in & out.

This was a great fun trail – I would grade the trail itself as beginner-intermediate level, but at the higher end of that due to the length & elevation (all between 2260 & 2270 m).  The start of it is rocky, but later on it’s mostly dirt.  You do spend a lot of time in the trees, but every so often you get a glimpse of the canyon & then all of a sudden there is a magnificent view that you can be sure not many other people ever see.  I had heard that there’s not much climbing, but there is a bit (apparently I did almost 600 metres all up) – but it’s all pretty easy (middle ring the whole time, & mostly in a small cog).  Despite having been up in the mountains for over a year, I was a just little shorter of breath than normal.  The last eight or so kilometres is great fun as it only has one decent climb in it & you can let it rip on the flatter sections.  I saw quite a few deer, some beautiful birds & flutterbys (the bright yellow ones were the best) & something that may have been a marmot. Only hitch of the ride was losing the seal on my tubeless rear tire – a bit of rest while I had to go back to a tube.  Unfortunately the smog rolled in from California & obscured the view a little in haze.

bikes, GPS, MTB, roadtrip, snow, travel, USA

Telluride & some riding out of Dolores

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Not wanting to spend two consecutive days looking at ancient holes in the ground & so on, we went for the suggestion of a nice drive to somewhere “starting with T with a gondola up from town” – at least, that is what Valerie described it as.  I went for Telluride, about a seventy-mile drive north east of Cortez, mostly following the Dolores River – this worked well, as I wanted to ride at Dolores in the afternoon.

The mid-morning drive up the valley was just stunning with the sun really bringing out the contrast between the dark green ponderosa pines & the bright yellow-green of the deciduous trees lining the valley above the fast flowing river.

We climbed up to over 3100m/10000ft to get over Lizard Head Pass & then down to Telluride. I didn’t know too much about the town, except it was once a big mining town & is now a big ski resort/mountain town (sounds vaguely familiar).

Apparently their winter is holding on a bit, with two feet of snow a fortnight ago – but today was a stunner & I was excited to learn there are bike trails at the top of the (free) gondola that runs up to another little town (Mountain Village – possibly the least imaginative name in Colorado, what a shocker) & most of the ski lifts.

My bike got its first ride on a gondola – been on plenty of chairlifts.  That’s Telluride down there.

Alas, the visitor center was wrong – the bike trails were closed due to too much snow. So we made up for it with a very pleasant ride along the San Miguel River that runs through town. There is a Mountain Film festival on this long weekend, so town had a lot of life to it. We didn’t have long, but I really liked Telluride – looks expensive though, Valerie saw one 5 bedroom, 7 bath house priced at a cool nine million.

The drive back down the valley was just as pretty & I was riding by four o’clock. With four loops to choose from, I went for the longest & hardest option – to make sure I got my money’s (not that I had to pay anything) worth. The riding was mostly at 2300m around a mesa top in more pine forest – it was nice to be riding in trees again. I’m not sure there was anything advanced about this intermediate-advanced level trail & the trail obviously wasn’t as well designed as yesterday’s ride at Phil’s World. Since when is routing the trail down the middle of a creek a valid trailbuilding option? Occasionally there was a little bit of interest, but mostly it was pretty hohum – the surface was often rutted out by bike tires or six-inch deep horse hoof holes. Still, I got a fair bit of climbing in & time on the bike is time on the bike – I may be getting a little fitter as I did the first loop (2-4 hours) in 1.40 then went on to the adjoining beginner loop, hoping for some views of the mountains – but was disappointed. The highlight was the beautiful grassy meadows, different summer flowers, the very loud croaking of frogs & seeing some eagles gliding around – fantastic. After over 100 km of mostly singletrack riding in three days, I might have a day off the bike tomorrow as we go to Four Corners & Monument Valley.