The Utah motorbiking saga continues...
BTW, I don't recall if I've mentioned it already, but I've posted the GPS tracks of our riding in the Document Library https://vcmc.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=86&club_id=370060
Our last planned ride for Moab was to ride all the passes of the La Sal Mountains, just east of Moab and with some snow at the tops year-round. We would start by riding up the Onion Creek Road on the east side of Castle Valley, then heading SW to the La Sal Mountains and ride the roads through the three passes there.
The ride up Onion Creek went well. There wasn't much water in the stream so we didn't get too wet going through the gazillion crossings. I lifted my feet up and Don tried to pop the front wheel over every time. There were about a half dozen adventure bikes in front of us, so when they stopped for a break, we kept going so we could keep out of their dust. The road wasn't too rocky there, but I knew it would get worse and we'd be at their heels trying to pass.
When we got to the top of what Garmin calls "Onion Creek and Hideout" Rd, we headed away from the La Sals to ride up to Polar Mesa. I was expecting it to be a sketchy road, but it was almost good enough for a Honda Civic. On top of the mesa it wasn't quite as good, but more fun. We rode to the edge to get a good view back down into Castle Valley:
On the way back down, we had a great view of the La Sals:
The road in the foreground is the Polar Mesa Road.
We stopped at a place that had fossilized dinosaur tracks, and also an overlook of the Castle Valley, this time from the opposite side as Polar Mesa:
From there, the plans fell apart. It turns out that the road we were going to take, La Sal Loop Road, was closed. We found out later they decided that the peak tourist season was the time to repave it! (I've got to say, though, that Utah does a great job of keeping their gravel roads in really good shape.) We found an old jeep road that went part-way past the closure, and got us to Miner's Basin Road, which we were going to climb and have lunch at the top. The road to Miner's Basin is extremely rocky, with some places having large (almost soccer ball sized) loose rocks, but it wasn't steep where it was loose, so we made it without much problem.
There was a parking area where the road ended, a vault toilet, a couple of trailheads and a large pond. And no bothersome bugs. It was very pretty, but I can't imagine very many people driving up that road to get to the trails for hiking!
After lunch, we bumped our way back down to the La Sal Loop Road where we could see the road work a few hundred yards in the direction we wanted to go, so we headed back down the jeep road we took up to get there. The jeep road was just technical enough to be really fun to ride, so even though we couldn't complete the route I had planned, we did get some good riding in and see some spectacular views!
Overall riding distance was 114 miles. We were riding about 4000' higher than Moab, so we didn't notice the hot weather at all until we got back down to the valley.
We hadn't planned any rides for the next day. I wanted to leave it free in case we couldn't do one of the earlier rides because of weather or whatever. I rode up to Arches National Park in the morning and toured through there. There's some pretty amazing geology to see there! If you go to Moab, you need to visit Arches NP. Don met another rider in the RV Park who knew the area well and went with him up to the famous Slickrock Trail where he tried the "Practice Loop." I did that last year and know that it's not easy because of really steep hills, sharp turns, and possible drops to your death if you get too far off the line. Traction is good because it's almost 100% sandstone, but everything is done at really low speed. That's one of the things that inspired me to get a Rekluse clutch for my bike. In the end, Don didn't get banged up too badly.
The photo is of a huge rock formation called Three Gossips in Arches NP:
The next day we packed up our campers early and headed down to the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park and the extremely challenging Elephant Hill jeep road.