Slickrock Trail (not!)

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Sunday, September 21, 2008
Moab is famous for its location near Arches National Park and the Colorado River Gorge. It is also famous for mountain biking on “slickrock’ - a hard smooth yellow Navajo sandstone than caps a wide area around the hills overlooking the town. Our mountain bikes made it to Moab chiefly for an opportunity to ride the slickrock.

To our dismay the slickrock biking trail is classified as expert with steep ups and downs and intimidating to us flatlanders. So we did an internet and visitors centre search for a milder trail and found the Bar M trail, 9 miles north of town. The second problem was the high temperature - 30 deg C today and too hot to ride anywhere except in an air conditioned truck camper.

So we drove back to the Colorado River valley and explored two side valleys - Castle and Professor with red rock mesa, cliffs and spires. Professor valley contains the Fisher Towers - dark red spires that photograph perfectly in the setting sun. Castle Valley contains tall thin spires with names Priest and Nuns, Mother Superior and the Convent. Desert all around but a stream from the La Sal Mountains passes through on its way to the Colorado and irrigates a small Adventist farming community green with constant irrigation.

Then onto the Bar M biking trail at 5:00 PM with the temperature now dropping to 25 deg C. It is a well marked 7 mile loop in dirt track interspersed with Navajo sandstone slabs. Perfect for flatlanders. Views of Arches Park to the east made the scenery familiar.
We stayed on the Bar M trail although there are many additional routes leading off our trail. We decided to whimp out on the ‘Cliff” - a side loop on sandstone rock following the edge of a 10 metre deep by 50 metre wide gulley cut in an otherwise flat desert sage covered landscape.

At 7:00 PM we arrived back at trail head as the sun set and headed home for our final night in the noisy Moab KOA. Tomorrow we head south east.

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Photos

Colorado River
Looking downstream to Route 191 Bridge north of Moab

Castle valley
Priest & Nuns and Mother Superior. Good resemblance?

Colorado River Gorge
Looking up stream from Professor Valley