Monday, November 14, 2011

Moab Bike Trip: Best Day Ever / Unscheduled Dismount

Day 13: Mega Steps and Baby Steps and EKG and Little Salty and Oh It Was Awesome.  For me...

Have you figured out yet that I had an awesome day?

It was perfect.  Except one thing, but I'll get to that...

Beautiful blue skys, fantastic swoopy, technical, sticky singletrack.  Sections of slickrock.

Sorry, getting distracted.

We started the day not really sure where the trailhead for Mega Steps was.  We knew it was down the road from the Klondike Bluffs trailhead (the trails connect as you can see below), but they are all new in the last few years and we didn't have a map.

Moab Day 13

Finally I saw a small Jeep trail veer off the highway.  Turns out it was the correct road and also led to a collection of dinosaur tracks!  There were five different sets of tracks, although we were only able to find three of them.  The coolest thing was that the exhibit was completely open and you were able to do whatever you wanted except make plaster casts of the prints.  I was astunded at how big the tracks were.  I mean, I know dinosaurs were big, but this was surreal...

Moab Day 13

I am standing in an Sauropod footprint - he or she would have weighed in at eighteen tons so said the signs.

We then headed to the trailhead for Mega Steps.  I was a little bit apprehensive about what the trails would be like.  We had been very happy with the technical level of Baby Steps - was Mega Steps a mega jump in difficulty?

Turns out no... it was fantastic, better than Baby Steps singletrack!  For more than five miles we wound our way around various rock formations and up slickrock.

Moab Day 13

We finished up the loop down our favourite downhill section, Baby Steps North.  It is perfect downhill for me.  Just difficult enough that it keeps me on edge, but easy enough that I don't have to walk my bike constantly.  The first time we were here I walked about a half a dozen sections.  Today I only walked one!  Success!

At this point, we had only been riding for about an hour and a half and still had tons of daylight left.  We decided to make another loop around EKG, back up Little Salty, and around Mega Steps in the other direction.  EKG turned out to be a little bit difficult and not as flowy as the other sections, but I was still having a fantastic time and enjoying the challenges. 

Then it happened.

Matt managed to bury his front tire in a foot and a half ledge.  His bike washed out front under him and he performed an unscheduled dismount to the tune of a slickrock ledge to the mid thigh.  It all happened so fast I almost ran right into him.  At first I though he had landed on his elbow (and dislocated it again), but it turned out to be a grapefruit sized contusion on his thigh.  I managed to take a picture:

Moab Day 13

I promise I am a loving, caring person - the first words out of his mouth were "I'll live", so I had established everything was at least somewhat OK.  

The only problem was that he could only ride with one leg, and walking was worse, and we were 7km from the car.  And single-legged pedaling is slow, difficult, and not conducive to mountain biking.  Thankfully, the end of the singletrack section of EKG was quite close and then it was just across the jeep road towards the car.  But it was definitely the end of the day.  

A fantastic day for me.  And thankfully the last day.  Lucky in a way I guess...

No comments:

Post a Comment