It’s mid-1986. Mountain bikes have only been around for a few years. If you’ve even heard of a mountain bike, or are lucky enough to have one, it’s a very basic machine. Heavy steel frame, no shocks of any kind, weak cantilever brakes.
I’m working at Security Life, in downtown Denver. A coworker Charlene Olsen ( rare true Colorado native, born in Vail), starts talking up this weird concept, a mountain bike ride in Utah, near Moab. Something she’s only heard rumors about . . . a path through an area of petrified sand dunes, created by local motocross boys. Rideable.
Somehow she talks a bunch of us into this. Other than her sister Cheryl, and Cheryl’s boyfriend, I’d never met any of these people before, don’t remember their names, and have never seen most of them again. But they were a fun and solid crew. Off we went, a loose group of cars, the goal to meet up somewhere in Moab (this being 15 years before the mobile phone).
This first small group of photos shows some of the fantastic rock formations that define Utah. I was driving alone, I believe I shot
these from the window of my moving car.
(click thumbnails below to see photo galleries, which will come up in a new tab. This page sticks around, you can come back to it and keep going.)
The fun starts when we all gather up in Moab. At this point in time, Moab is a small, sleepy town at the end of the road. Mountain biking, and Moab’s fabled place in it, are in the distant future. Most of the townies have never heard of this course we seek. Finally someone waves their arms, gives us some bad directions out past the city dump. Off we go, making wrong turns, until we luck out and find it. There’s nothing there. There is no one there. And this is Memorial Day Weekend!
We don’t find this odd at all. Who would come to this gawdforsaken place? All to be seen are painted, dashed lines heading out into a semi-surreal area of rolling “hills” of petrified sand.
We discover a “practice loop”. It’s late in the day, so we take it. We discover that this smooth, rolling rock is actually easy to pedal on, that a rider can go up hills so steep that on dirt it would not be possible. We learn to “lean way out” over our front bars, a necessary technique to keep from flipping over
backwards, and the rear wheel doesn’t slip! Traction is unbelievable. It seems miraculous.
That night we car camp a few hundred yards from the start of the trail.
The next day begins in earnest. It is very warm early in the morning. I don’t remember how long the main trail was, but we’d been told to expect 4-6 hours. We carry as much water as we can. Camelbaks have not been invented yet. I haul my 4 pound anchor of a Nikon.
This next group of pictures was taken at random at various parts of the loop. We heard voices out there, but saw no other riders. We were essentially alone.
We survive the ride. Everyone had a blast. It took 4-5 hours for us to get through this. No one had much of any off road experience before this day. We had helmets, but half of our group didn’t have biking gloves, bike shorts. No one had clip-in pedals. SPD would not be invented for another 4-5 years.
We found a beautiful spot down near the Colorado River to camp. We got out of our trucks. I strolled maybe 100 yards along with Charlene. Some smaller, very light colored flies with delta wings came buzzing around. One bit me. Ouch, man that hurt. One bit Charlene. She hollered. Then another and another. In a semi-panic, we ran back to my truck. The motion attracted just a swarm of these flies. The faster we ran, the more worked up they got. They savaged us in seconds. We kept running. We jumped into my truck, 20 flies in there with us. They kept flying and biting, flying and biting. We fought them off, killed them one at a time until we could sit there and take a deep breath. Our beautiful spot no longer seemed beautiful. The others had suffered our fate. We had a brief meeting from one truck to the next, windows cracked just barely. We got the hell out of there. Drove to a different spot, high and dry, no water. No bugs! Much better.
These last few shots were taken in the dry canon where we spent our last night before driving home.
Coda:
Two years later, I came back with a different crew. The world had changed. Signs announced “Slickrock!!”. Moab sported several new bike stores, renting high end bikes to the tourists. When we drove out to where the course begins, there were signs pointing the way. And when we arrived, I was astonished to find a 100 car, paved parking lot, with a portapotty.
I was not happy to find 100 bikers. The place was swarming. It was like trying to pedal down a New York City sidewalk. Every time we came to a difficult section, riders bunched up. A person had to wait and wait for their turn.
We had to drive a considerable distance from the starting line to find a place to camp. And just like that, mountain biking Eden quickly came to an end. Moab had been “discovered. I haven’t been back. It’s hard to imagine the mobs that must descend on the place by now, 30 years and a billion mountain bikes later.