I mentioned before that Moab and the surrounding area is home to some of the greatest mountain biking on the planet. It is well known for the world famous, highly technical Slickrock Bike Trail. (Which basically means don't get on it unless you know what you're doing.) We didn't. Mom, Dad and I are road bikers, but mountain bikes are a whole different animal! Seeing that we had no desire to break or necks, we hired a guide from a local company called Rim Tours.
Rim Tours offers a variety of different guided trips to trails in and around Moab. You choose how many hours you want to bike, what level of trail you want to do, etc. We chose to ride the Klondike Bluffs trail, which takes you up a climb near Arches NP. Along the way our guide taught us how to navigate the slick rock on our full suspension bikes. (If you've never ridden a full suspension, try it! It feels like you're riding on a trampoline.) We learned how to do small jumps, climb up and over boulders and we even saw some dinosaur tracks embedded in the rocks near the trail. I wish I could say that the ride down was easier than the ride up, but it was so steep that I rode the brakes the entire way, and my knuckles were white by the end.
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| Mountain biking! |
Another fun thing to do is to head up to Fisher Towers just north of Moab. The hike isn't very difficult, but the rock formations you see there are crazy! The rock fins shoot up towards the sky creating sheer rock walls. But what you really want to look for while you're there are the rock climbers. Dotted all along the walls you'll see tiny people hanging by ropes, traversing the 90 degree angles. We stood there for quite a while, with our mouths open, and just watched as they slowly made there way up the side.
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| Yeah, they climb THOSE! (Pic courtesy of Climb-Utah.) |
Our other activity outside of the park was to go horseback riding. I don't know, I guess it's a girl-thing, but I love going riding. Plus, it just seemed so country-western to go riding in Utah next to the Colorado River. About a 20 minute drive from Moab, Red Cliffs Lodge is a classic western lodge that was the site of numerous John Wayne films (had my dad right there). In fact, the lodge has a Western Movie Museum in the basement that features memorabilia from all the movies filmed in the area. We checked it out while we were waiting for the tour to start.
The riding was nice, but, honestly, it wasn't "wow". The horses were bored out of their minds and mine kept getting sassy with me. The scenery definitely made up for the horses' bad attitudes, and it was cool to think that John Wayne probably rode the same trails. I don't know if I would recommend the riding, but the lodge itself was worth the trip out there.
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sassy horse. hehe.
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