This morning we hitched up the trailer, found a place to dump our tanks and headed to our new camping destination near Canyonlands National Park. We arrived at Dead Horse Point State Park and set up the trailer in site 2 - our reserved site for the night. I think in nearly 4 months of being on the road, this is the first place that we've called and made reservations in advance. It's a cool state park and books up every night so reservations were a must. We wanted to stay 3 nights so we had to reserve site 2 for one night and then move to site 15 for the next 2 nights. Not a big deal - wouldn't be the first time we've moved sites at a campground.
The park has a new mountain biking trail that was completed last year and we were both looking forward to riding it. The full trail system is known as the Intrepid Trail and has three nesting loops of varying lengths.
This trail was designed as a beginner, family friendly mountain bike trail. Beginner my butt. While it's not particularly strenuous - we're on a mesa at 6,000 feet with sheer cliff drop offs and thus only a slight elevation change over the course of the trail, I can't understand how rocky sections of trail with ledges and steps equals a beginner ride.
The trailhead starts at the Visitor Center which is a 1/4 mile from the campground. Very handy. We rode the nine mile outer loop known as Big Chief and stopped frequently to take in the views.
We played around on the trails and chuckled that beginners were expected to ride it. Obviously, beginner to us means something different out here. I would be terrified to be handed a mountain bike with no prior experience and told this was the trail I needed to ride.
In my opinion, there is a certain level of skill that needs to be acquired before a beginner should ride through rocky sections with drop offs and ledges. To me, a nice hard packed single track with some small rooty sections and perhaps the occasional small tree obstacle along the path to challenge them a bit is a fine beginner ride. Learning to finesse the bike under you and acquainting yourself with the balance and body English required to keep it upright is part of the beginner learning experience. Not to mention learning how to lift your front end over an obstacle while powering up a climb or maneuvering and controlling your speed on downhills. Or so I thought. I think here they must toss someone a bike, tell them to ride technical rocky sections and then see if they make it out alive. If you do, you're now a mountain biker, if you don't, well then, you don't belong in Moab.
So...the beginner ride was fun and offered me some challenges. Here, I've had to learn to swallow my pride - I couldn't even clean my first Moab beginner trail. Ugh.
We were enjoying the variety of terrain (loose rock, ledges, sand, and slickrock) and then Bill experienced some, uh, intestinal distress, and had to book it back to the Visitor Center.
I took my time, stopped at the lookouts for some spectacular views of the canyon, and a couple of self portraits. :)
I headed towards the trailhead and Bill met me along the trail. He was feeling better and wanted to do another lap so we parted ways and I headed back to the trailer. Even a short 9 mile ride was enough to aggravate my cold and had me coughing and wheezing. Stupid sick.
After Bill completed his second lap and returned, we cleaned up, ate dinner and then went to the lookout on the Point to watch the sunset.
The canyon reminds me of a mini version of the Grand Canyon with a touch less color. There are definitely less tourists so it has the advantage there.
Sunset is coming earlier and earlier now (sigh) so we're left to occupy ourselves for several hours without daylight. Go SG1. :)
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