{"id":642,"date":"1986-05-31T11:36:39","date_gmt":"1986-05-31T11:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernloon.net\/wordpress30\/?p=642"},"modified":"2025-04-21T17:41:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T17:41:56","slug":"slickrock-for-the-first-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/?p=642","title":{"rendered":"Slickrock – For the first time"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s mid-1986.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Heavy steel frame, no shocks of any kind, weak cantilever brakes.<\/p>\n

I’m working at Security Life, in downtown Denver.\u00a0 A coworker Charlene Olsen ( rare true Colorado native,\u00a0 born in Vail), starts talking up this weird concept, a mountain bike ride in Utah, near Moab.\u00a0 Something she’s only heard rumors about . . . a path through an area of petrified sand dunes, created by local motocross boys.\u00a0 Rideable.<\/p>\n

Somehow she talks a bunch of us into this.\u00a0 Other than her sister Cheryl,\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But they were a fun and solid crew. \u00a0 Off we went, a loose group of cars, the goal to meet up somewhere in Moab (this being 15 years before the mobile phone).<\/p>\n

This first small group of photos shows some of the fantastic rock formations that define Utah.\u00a0 I was driving alone, I believe I shot
\nthese from the window of my moving car.<\/p>\n

(click thumbnails below to see photo galleries, which will come up in a new tab.\u00a0 This page sticks around, you can come back to it and keep going.)<\/p>\n

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The fun starts when we all gather up in Moab.\u00a0 At this point in time, Moab is a small, sleepy town at the end of the road.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Finally someone waves their arms, gives us some bad directions out past the city dump.\u00a0 Off we go, making wrong turns, until we luck out and find it.\u00a0 There’s nothing there.\u00a0 There is no one there.\u00a0 And this is Memorial Day Weekend!<\/p>\n

We don’t find this odd at all.\u00a0 Who would come to this gawdforsaken place?\u00a0 All to be seen are painted, dashed lines heading out into a semi-surreal area of rolling “hills” of petrified sand.<\/p>\n

We discover a “practice loop”.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 We learn to “lean way out” over our front bars, a necessary technique to keep from flipping over
\nbackwards, and the rear wheel doesn’t slip! Traction is unbelievable.\u00a0 It seems miraculous.<\/p>\n

That night we car camp a few hundred yards from the start of the trail.<\/p>\n

The next day\u00a0 begins in earnest.\u00a0 It is very warm early in the morning.\u00a0 I don’t remember how long the main trail was, but we’d been told to expect 4-6 hours.\u00a0 We carry as much water as we can.\u00a0 Camelbaks have not been invented yet.\u00a0 I haul my 4 pound anchor of a Nikon.<\/p>\n

This next group of pictures was taken at random at various parts of the loop.\u00a0 We heard voices out there, but saw no other riders.\u00a0 We were essentially alone.<\/p>\n

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We survive the ride.\u00a0 Everyone had a blast.\u00a0 It took 4-5 hours for us to get through this.\u00a0 No one had much of any off road experience before this day.\u00a0 We had helmets, but half of our group didn’t have biking gloves, bike shorts.\u00a0 No one had clip-in pedals.\u00a0 SPD would not be invented for another 4-5 years.<\/p>\n

We found a beautiful spot down near the Colorado River to camp.\u00a0\u00a0 We got out of our trucks.\u00a0 I strolled maybe 100 yards along with Charlene.\u00a0 Some smaller, very light colored flies with delta wings came buzzing around.\u00a0 One bit me. Ouch, man that hurt.\u00a0 One bit Charlene. She hollered.\u00a0 Then another and another.\u00a0 In a semi-panic, we ran back to my truck.\u00a0 The motion attracted just a swarm of these flies.\u00a0 The faster we ran, the more worked up they got. They savaged us in seconds.\u00a0 We kept running.\u00a0 We jumped into my truck, 20 flies in there with us. They kept flying and biting, flying and biting.\u00a0 We fought them off,\u00a0 killed them one at a time until we could sit there and take a deep breath.\u00a0 Our beautiful spot no longer seemed beautiful.\u00a0 The others had suffered our fate.\u00a0 We had a brief meeting from one truck to the next, windows cracked just barely.\u00a0 We got the hell out of there.\u00a0 Drove to a different spot, high and dry,\u00a0 no water.\u00a0 No bugs!\u00a0 Much better.<\/p>\n

These last few shots were taken in the dry canon where we spent our last night before driving home.<\/p>\n

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Coda:<\/p>\n

Two years later, I came back with a different crew.\u00a0 The world had changed.\u00a0 Signs announced “Slickrock!!”.\u00a0 Moab sported several new bike stores, renting high end bikes to the tourists.\u00a0 When we drove out to where the course begins, there were signs pointing the way.\u00a0 And when we arrived, I was astonished to find a 100 car, paved parking lot, with a portapotty.<\/p>\n

I was not<\/span> happy to find 100 bikers.\u00a0 The place was swarming. It was like trying to pedal down a New York City sidewalk.\u00a0 Every time we came to a difficult section, riders bunched up.\u00a0 A person had to wait and wait for their turn.<\/p>\n

We had to drive a considerable distance from the starting line to find a place to camp.\u00a0 And just like that, mountain biking Eden quickly came to an end. Moab had been “discovered.\u00a0 I haven’t been back.\u00a0 It’s hard to imagine the mobs that must descend on the place by now,\u00a0 30 years and a billion mountain bikes later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s mid-1986.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Heavy steel frame, no shocks of any kind, weak cantilever brakes. I’m working at Security Life, in downtown Denver.\u00a0 A coworker Charlene Olsen … Continue reading “Slickrock – For the first time”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo","category-vacation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2709,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions\/2709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/northernloon.net\/travelogue\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}