The Whole Enchilada

That’s the name given to the ride here in Moab that starts up in the La Sal mountains at Burro Pass, elev 11,000 feet. We had initially planned on using a shuttle service to take us up when we thought it was $100 for the van but when we double checked it was $200. Since HO had a vehicle and the bike shop in town said it could make it up there as well as the truck we decided to shuttle it ourselves. We had the truck packed up the night before so first thing we headed out, first into town to drop off HO’s vehicle. Up first a paved road then a gravel road to Geyser Pass, total of about an hour’s drive. The last mile to the road up to Burro pass was pretty degraded so we just rode from Geyser Pass. It was a good 800 foot climb, first on really really old jeep trail then on single track, in about 1.5 miles up to the pass at 11,000 feet. It started out great, very reminiscent of Crested Butte although a bit looser tread on the track. Well that lasted for about 200 yards. Then it got steep and very loose. About a quarter mile down or so, David and I both agreed that we had had more fun on a bike before as we waited for HO and Howie to catch up. We rode it all save a few of the steep loose switch backs but HO who is stuck with my 26” Fisher (he’s now spoiled with his big wheel bike) and Howie were even less thrilled then we were. It got better from there, as things leveled out a bit and ran along a creek. We moved from pine forest to a nice ride through aspen groves ending up at Warner Lake campground. Who would have thunk , pine, wildflowers, and aspen on a Moab ride.

From there it was a short dirt road ride to the Hazzard County trail.

As with all good rides, it started with a bit of a climb culminating in an epic view of both Spanish Valley where Moab is as well as Castle Valley, the valley the Porcupine Rim edges. It was a great single track ride down through meadow and scrub. Locals have built up rock “gap” jumps along it that we all took the bailout options on as the consequences of a mistake were pretty huge. The Hazzard County trail ends right across from where the Kokopelli trail heads along an old degraded jeep trail.

This heads down to the Porcupine Singletrack. This is an amazing piece of trail switching between hard packed sandy soil and “slickrock.” For those that have never ridden it, slickrock is a sandstone that actually provides incredible traction for bike tires. I believe the name initially came from the poor horses that had to cross it, not so much traction. The other amazing part of this trail is the incredible views of Castle Valley. For the most part the trail was pretty easy to follow with one exception where HO came through with the find of the rest of the single track.

This runs into the more Porcupine Singletrack, same sort of drill and again we lost the track at one point and again HO to the rescue, it was quite the drop through a shoot to continue on the correct path. This put us back on the Porcupine Rim soon to hook up with original Porcupine Rim “trail.”

This is what Howie and I rode 8 years ago when we were in Moab. Its basically a very technical jeep trail for about 7 miles before turning to singletrack as it hit the rim and heads down to the Colorado River. The memory of this part of the ride was a rather scary, very exposed, technical ride down. What it seemed like this time was a fun, somewhat technical ride with a few points necessitating a little walking, but nothing like what I remembered as it was one of my first western rides. We ended up 7000 feet below where we started and about 45 degrees warmer, it was in the mid 90’s at the end. After about 7 hours we had riden about 29 miles from geyser pass to the bottom of Porcupine, then about 6 miles into Moab on road and bike path and back to the car. We were all glad we did the whole thing but in retrospect, next time we would skip the time and effort to get all the way up to Burro and just do the ride from Hazzard.

Probably the funniest part of the ride was as we were heading back to town a roadie blows by me then I see roadie-HO blow by me and bridge the gap to the roadie. HO said he stayed off him enough that he wasn’t drafting but could tell the roadie was not amused and tried to drop HO on a small rise but couldn’t.