Tue 8/16: Fun Biking, Crazy Biking

Since we had rented the bikes yesterday, the plan for today was all about biking. Lynn and George had whetted their appetite for something very adventurous, and decided to try their hand at the Slickrock Trail. Vince was tempted to go along, but decided to stick with Joanna since she would be biking today as well. I drove George and Lynn to their trail head around 9:00. Vince came along for the ride, and we spent awhile stopping in various tour offices to get prices on kayak rental and off road rentals for a future date. We then returned to load up our bikes and pick up Joanna. Our plan was to shuttle the bikes back to the Bar M area that we had tried yesterday, and then taken the 7 mile paved bike trail back to Moab. We chose this because it is downhill pretty much the entire way, and therefore suited to our exhausted state of mind. It was a fun and easy ride, and we were surprised just how quickly we reached the end. We did see a few impressive (insane?) souls riding UP the steep 7 mile hill. All the more impressive given that a few of them looked to be in their 60's.

By now it was about 1:00pm, and on the drive home we finally heard from Lynn. They were STILL on the slickrock trail, exhausted, out of water, and at least an hour from the trail head. They wanted to give me a heads up that they would be looking for a pickup, along with a water delivery when they reached it. When Lynn finally called an hour and a half later, they were coming into town after walking their bikes down a tiny, treacherous path down the side of the valley into Moab (NOT on their trail map. Later determined to be "Dave's Trail").


I quickly met them at the nearest intersection, where they had found a small ice cream shop and were attempting to recuperate. Lynn seemed to be in reasonably good shape, but George was clearly not. He was very dehydrated, and probably on the verge of heat stroke. All told, they spent over 5 hours in the desert heat, without water near the end. Once he had recovered enough to stand up again, we returned to the room where he was able to shower and take a nap. Afterwards he expressed his belief that the trail was so difficult as to not even actually be doable, and that nobody could possibly do it without walking their bike half the time. He seemed a bit disbelieving when he talked to the worker in the bike shop who could managed to entire trail in about 1.5 hours without ever getting of their bike.

Since neither George nor Lynn was interested in doing anything further, I wound up going to Arches National Park with Vince and Joanna. They will be leaving on Saturday morning, and I was not sure if they would have another chance, so I did not want to waste the opportunity. We had a good time hiking through the Devils Garden section, which is one of the most impressive in the park. I was hoping to find Wall Arch (though I could not remember it's name at the time), because it collapsed some time subsequent to my previous visit to Arches. I have a picture of myself standing under it in 2007, and would have loved to get another picture now that it is gone. Unfortunately, we did not have a map and I did not remember it's name, so we never did find it.

We had brought some light sources with us since we were visiting rather late in the day. This turned out to be a good thing, because the sun set pretty rapidly and we did wind up hiking back to the car in the dark. We probably would have made it if we did not have lights, but since we did we felt free to explore a bit farther than we would have otherwise. By the time we reached the trail head, a lot of stars were in the sky and we stopped to stargaze for a bit. The horizon was still light from sunset, so we drove another 20 minutes toward the park exit (It's a BIG park), and stopped again. Fortuitously, we happened to stop at just the right moment to see the full moon breach the horizon and amazingly rapidly rise fully into the sky. The light from the moon quickly obscured alot of the stars, but we still managed to catch several satellites crossing the sky. From there is was straight back to the house for much needed sleep.