Sunday, October 15 - Procupine Rim

Waiting for breakfast

We got a bit of a late start today because of the lines for breakfast. They stopped the 24 hors of Moab ride last night because conditions were to bad to ride and people were having to be taken out by ambulance -- wimps. So there were thousands of people crawling all over Moab this morning who would have been out at the race. After breakfast we drove over to pick up our bikes from the shop again and decided to ride the Porcupine Rim trail. We hired a shuttle to take us up to the trailhead, and got started riding at about 11:00 am.

Our ride to the Porcupine Rim trailhead

When we arrived at the trailhead it was still a little cold, but the first 3 miles of the ride are up hill so we warmed up quickly. The trail follows a 4wd road for most of it 14.4 miles, but ends with a highly technical singletrack descent to the Colorado River. This is not to say that the road portion of the ride was not highly technical. There were plenty of hike-a-bike sections for us and the altitude (we climbed up to about 7300 feet) made us stop from time to time. However, these stops were welcome because the view from the trail was outstanding as the clouds broke. Chris B. rode on ahead of us because he is more skilled on the technical sections and wanted to ride Slickrock again when he finished with Porcupine. We did not see hime again until he returned to the hotel at the end of the day.

The climb up to Porcupine Rim

The view from the climb

When we reached to summit, we were all ready for a break from the climbing. Unfortunately, the Castle Valley overlook was completely obscured by dense fog. We will have to ride this trail again someday to see that view. We rested there for a few minutes, and got another rider to take a picture of us before starting out again.

We made it to the top

The next few miles of the trail are some of the most exhilarating mountain biking I have ever done. The trail swoops along the Porcupine Rim over sandstone outcrops and patches of sandy soil. It is mostly downhill interspersed with short, steep climbs. This part of the ride is all about momentum and trusting your suspension. We had a few crashes along the way, but no broken bones that were are aware of. The most scary and, once we determined he was OK, comical crash was Irv slow motion endo. It occurred at a point in the trail where you had to make a sharp right hand turn and then drop down a couple of rock ledges followed by another sharp left turn. We all stopped to assess the situation and Irv decided to ride it. He feeling his mojo big time and nothing was going to stop him. He dropped down the first ledge and stopped completely rising up on his front wheel where he paused for what seemed like an eternity before continuing over his handle bars. He ended up spralled on the out crop between the two ledges with the bike on top of him. Scott ran over to help and asked Irv if he was allright, which elicited a mumbled response to the effect that he had felt better. After taking a moment to regroup, we continued on down the trail.

Fun along the trail

The last portion of the Porcupine Rim trail is singletrack that drops down the side of a canyon from the mesa top to the Colorado River. The first part is a fun ride interspersed with short technical sections that, if you make a mistake, would send you plummeting over the edge. We chose to walk these sections. As you drop farther down the canyon, the technical sections become more common, and we ended up walking about as much as we rode. Of course, all of it was rideable, just not by us.

The singletrack portion

We all made it through in about 4 hours and felt proud of our accomplishments on the trail. Chris B. rode the entire trail in less than 2 hours and then went on to ride the Slickrock trail again. He is either a total stud or totally crazy. We have not yet decided. Perhaps it is both. We are accumulating scars at a rapid rate as momentos of our time in Moab. The image below shows the momentos acquired on the legs of Irv, Jeff and Ed from or day on the Porcupine Rim trail.

The damage done