I hit the road with some friends a couple weeks back, headed for Nevada and Utah.
DAY 1 - Bootleg Canyon
The late Brent Thompson put together an incredible bike playground here, saving some of it from becoming a golf course. In the 5 years since I've been here there's been some improvements.
Cool signage.
Skinny practice.
Ramps and teeters.
The fun, rocky, flowy trails are just as good.
We climbed West Leg, continued on Caldera, up Boy Scout and tried Skyline. This one is new since my last trip - I remember riding the bottom portion after it was freshly cut, but it stopped after only a few hundred feet. It's the only double black diamond XC trail at Bootleg, and we found out why.
A narrow tread with super steep drop offs.
Challenging technical rock drops and ups.
Some of which caused two riders to suffer some gashes.
We hauled down Girl Scout, then Mother, down PAR None and up P.O.W. I now realize I should be going DOWN P.O.W. I'm headed back there on Thanksgiving, so will do it right then.
Losing light, we completed the day on the IMBA Epic trail and packed up to continue on to Mesquite for the night.
DAY 2 - Gooseberry Mesa
First time to the Goose. The Mojos loved it so much they got all kissy with each other.
The story and the map. We'd be riding with one of the guys that made this place happen - Morgan Harris - the next day.
Grippy rock with painted dots to follow.
Stunning scenery.
Ran into some fellow San Diego riders - Mark on the left and some guy on a Huffy in the red shorts.
Lots of fun ascents to work on. Some pretty steep.
Did I mention the stunning scenery?
Don't look where you don't want to go. That first step's a doozy.
Good times and sore arms and hands after this day.
DAY 3 - Little Creek Mesa / Jem
Little Creek is the mesa just to the south of Gooseberry, basically on the other side of the road. Mo had contacted Morgan Harris ahead of time to arrange a ride day. He started riding Gooseberry in the 90s with his twin brother and realized the potential for more fun trails than the dirt road. They saw that they had a Moab right in their back yard, and worked with the BLM to make it happen. His next project after Gooseberry was on Little Creek Mesa. He envisioned a similar trail network, but one that would apparently make some great connections to other trails in the area. Today he'd give us a tour of the eastern half of the mesa that is fairly hard to navigate due to the absence of trail dots over the massive slabs. Two of my riding partners have hit other main trails on the mesa before, but could never complete this side to to navigation and time challenges.
If you see this man, buy him a beer.
Hard to miss him on the road.
Morgan was the first to discover Indian petroglyphs in numerous locations on Little Creek. Even archeologists aren't sure if they're 300 years old or thousands of years old. He also showed us native American "dumps" where they threw their trash, filled with old pottery shards. Unfortunately, all these items pose a big problem with completing the trail network Morgan had in mind. Some of the archeologists don't want anyone touching the stuff and don't want trails around, and one of the main land managers agrees. However, some archeologists asserted that the presence of responsible trail users helps deter the irresponsible abuse that occurs when no one else is around. Mmmm, sounds like a familiar theme, no?
Huge slabs on Little Creek, but no dots here. Only "cairns" or piles of rock to guide you as there's a feeling from land managers that the dots would be too intrusive here.
View of Gooseberry Mesa in the distance.
Super fun "Waterfall" section. Morgan used to ride this every run, but the rock juts out real far at the top and he hit his handlebar on it once and tumbled down. He rides it no more.
We finished up our ride, bought Morgan some lunch and we headed over to the Jem Trail in the Hurricane Cliffs Trail System. Morgan said this was on some Top 10 Most Flowy Trails list. It was a super windy day with sustained winds around 30mph and gusts probably up to 50 to 60mph. So the prospect of climbing back up after riding for 4 hours already was questionable. Morgan assured us the best way to do it was as a shuttle. Shuttle?
Oh, all right.
Some steep sections of Jem.
Have you ever railed a trail while pedaling as hard as you can in your big ring? That's how fast this trail was.
Stoked.
After two 7-mile runs, we packed it up and hit Hurricane for some grub and rest.
Killer trip. I'll be back soon.
