White Rim Wrap-Up: More Spectacle from America's Borax Belt!

I made a quick escape the next morning to avoid annoying the Park City crew all day with my incessant racket. I have to admit here that I was jealous of them on their mountain bikes. After years of cycling, off-road motorcycling felt akin to riding a mountain bike while wearing one of those sumo-wrestler Halloween suits. It's very hard to feel the grain of the trail through those giant motorcycles tires, and what is lacking in the finesse department is replaced by sheer brute force. Today I was faced with several pretty intimidating uphill climbs, technical enough that I had to walk them first to find the right line up. Once back on the bike, I pretty much had to close my eyes, peg the throttle and hope for the best. The main danger here is smashing and cracking the underside of the motor on a rock, in which case all your oil drains out onto the sand and the vultures move in. Luckily I made it up all the climbs with no problem, but in my book a well executed mountain bike climb using 0.5 horsepower is still a lot more satisfying than bullying your way up fossil-fuel style.
I stopped early at Whitecrack, which overlooks the again aptly named Maze district of Canyonlands, where the Park Service pretty much tells people not to go.



The Maze. Have your affairs in order.

By this point I had reached the point-of-no-return fuel wise, so when I reached the base of Hardscrabble Hill, the crux of the whole trail, I was understandably a bit intimidated, as I had to do or die. Now, any veteran off-road motorcyclist reading this will think the following description exaggerated and me a pansy, but never having really done this before made it a little stressful. The climb was littered with rocks (the beloved Babyheads of the mountain bike glossary) that tend to deflect your wheels in unpredictable directions when you hit them. This is a little scary when there's a drop-off on one side, and when stopping on the hill to adjust your course isn't really an option because its pretty hard to find enough traction to get six hundred pounds of mass moving again. But lo and behold, I was able to string dozens of semi-controlled lurches together into a successful assault of the hill.






Hardscrabble Hill. I could only stop to take pics of the smooth parts.

The next miles were sprinkled with 80 million ton stone columns, the occasional collarbone-threatening sand wash, dark clouds and conversations with mountain bikers.












The dead tree that had been trailing me since VA.

Early afternoon brought the Green river into sight, and I began the descent to my second night camp spot at the river's edge.






However, just as my campsite came into view Poseidon decided to drop the contents of the maelstrom in the above picture on me. My face shield immediately became opaque with wind-driven water, and the trail surface began to morph into the infamous and slippery "Utah Grease"that I had been warned about, but I managed to skid to a stop and take shelter in the camp latrine and dry my camera with tax-subsidized toilet paper.
After setting up camp, I dropped in on the just arriving Park City hoodlums, but they were understandably in poor form after pedaling thirty miles in the rain, so I wandered down a dry stream bed down to the Green.





It is green!

Then it was back to camp for a wretched and lukewarm dinner of Knorr(TM) Sides followed by a slow and lovely descent into slumber... tent-free and under the stars.



Day's End along the Green River

At cock's crow the next morning I downed a slug of instant coffee directly from my soot-covered pot, packed my things, and was forced immediately to perform an eye-opening climb up a mesa side:



Not what you need to be negotiating at 7 in the morning

A bit later, I parked my bike at the Fort Bottom trail and hiked the three miles to a cool Indian ruin perched on a butte above the Green:








Not only did the ancients build a stone fortress in a shadeless desert, they also built it on top of this 400 foot tall sandstone pyramid.

On the way back to my bike I was treated to some awesome views of the Green, a few longboats cruising slowly in the current below:



Now lest you think I fabricated this whole story in Starbucks with the help of Google Images, I got some mountain bikers back at the trail head to capture some irrefutable evidence:



Same SHI(r)T, different day



Rapidly running out of smile

I was in the home stretch now people, and after being forcefully enlisted by an phalanx of french soccer moms on bikes to find their errant support truck driver, I opened it up a little bit on a fun section of trail perched above the river:




...and then passed the Utah museum of modern art:



Just after elatedly crossing the boundary of the National park and the official end of the trail, I was forced to slog through a fifty-yard long soggy stream bed:




but immediately afterwords I ran into two of the Park City Crew in high form, laying in the sand next to their truck, waiting for the bikers to catch up and sipping on some 10:30 AM cold ones. Of course I joined them, and when the bikers arrived we made an exodus as a pack up the switchbacks to the canyon rim.

After saying our goodbyes I rode back out to the main park highway and immediately ran out of gas in front of a pack of attractive Spanish tourists. I nonchalantly struggled for ten minutes to free my extra gas can from a mass of nylon webbing, filled up my tank and headed back to my favorite Moab flophouse, on top of the world.

The White Rim was awesome, but it was just a preamble. Tomorrow I had plans to turn up the scenery meter even further with a little backpacking trip into the Needles district, bar-none the coolest place I have ever been in my life, and that includes Newark