mecca

so i enjoyed fruita, 18 road was awesome, and the loma trails were jaw dropping, particularly horse thief. but porcupine rim, in moab, utah, is the One Trail.

my sunburn has gotten better, it was making me pretty ill yesterday, but some hot food and sleep cured me. i feel good, i haven't crashed much so far, and nothing's hurting.

i caught the poison spider shuttle van at 8:00, which drove up for forty minutes, to part way up the kokopelli trail (which runs from loma to moab. on the shuttle i met a couple of rad canadians who were down from BC. and then i dropped off the face of the earth, for over 2 hours. i have never had so much fun.

koko was a great warm up, big and easy, just enough to let you get your legs awake for the fastness. from there it was down the road for a mile, hang a right past the cattle guard onto the LPS trail, which drains into porcupine rim proper. LPS is tight and twisty, with lots of flow and nice berms, it's downright hard to blow a corner on this ride. i met another trio of british columbians, three girls that were ripping it hard, and repping for their gender :P part way through LPS a steep rocky chute, which would not generally be described as ridable, dumps onto the plateau on the top of the rim. it's a fast flowy technical ride to the edge of the rim where the trail skirts the edge for maybe a mile. it's difficult for me to even remember what the rest was like, it blew by pretty quickly. it widens up and then it turns crazy fast. maybe even fast and furious. rock ledges are everywhere, i mean these things abound. i think i've done more small drops in two hours today than i have in my entire life. after an eternity the trail starts to run around the rim of a canyon, blowing altitude to get down to route 128, which runs next to the colorado and into moab. this singletrack section is intense. there are two or three more virtually unridable sections, and there is a lot of exposure and plenty of consequences. and then it's done, and your back on 128, and you ride 3 miles into town.

i don't really have any good pictures of biking in MOAB, so pretend that these are all of MOAB which is probably the best place i've been so far in my life.

tomorrow i'm going to ride the slickrock trail, from there i'm back on the road, heading north west this time.


here i am, at the mondo cafe


look closely, you will see an absurdly large bridge. going nowhere. in the midwest they need to build big things because the land is boring.


here are a couple of mondo wind turbine blades on a flatbed trailer. these things were long, i mean long long. like half again as long as a regular semi.


here is a shot from highway 128. i didn't take many pictures of the rocks. the rocks are beautiful. but images don't capture it. or they only capture part of it -- they give you the texture, but what they don't give you is the majesty. the depth of it all, the immenseness, the far awayness and the nearness. these things you're eyes can see, but a camera cannot. so i didn't take many photos of the rocks. highway 128, like route 70 through vail pass, is a road that makes the whole trip worth it.


this is where i woke up this morning. that's the colorado river you can just see below the cliffs, and down the slope. it burbles.


tomorrow, slickrock.