After four days of driving and spending nights at three hostels I arrived at Mesa Verde the first day of the season they were doing tours of the Cliff Palace. Pretty cool but I'm not real keen on tours.

Spent that night in a motel in Cortez, CO. The next day I drove to the Needles area of Canyonlands National Park thirty miles off the main highway about seventy miles south of Moab, UT. The drive there just got better and better and by the time I arrived at the campground area I was considering spending more than just the three days I had planned. The landscape was just so interesting and great to walk around in. After driving around the Sqaw Flat campground area to find a good camping spot I drove the "scenic" road out to the "slickrock" trail and went for a walk .

Slickrock is gently and steeply rounded hills of petrified sand dunes. Easy and fun to walk around on, but from the moment I started walking on it I longed to ride on it with a mountain bike (what I planned to do in the Moab area).

That evening I hiked up to a slickrock ridgetop near my campsite to watch the sun set over the rock formations of the valley, the red stone cliffs in the distance and the "needles" on the horizon .

The next day I drove about five miles to a trailhead for a trail to Chesler park , which is a very large desert meadow surrounded by tall spire-like rock formations (the "needles") .

About a mile into the hike I realized that one of the water bottles I had put on the dash to heat in the sun for a shower later would probably burst as the water, and especially the air, expanded. It would be a mess and quite possibly short out electronics in the dash or set off the car alarm as a big storm did in January. I debated about two minutes and then decided I'd lose an hour for piece of mind and began retracing my steps.

Later, I did have plenty of time though to walk the mile across the Chesler meadow when I got to it (five miles there) and to travel a mile down another trail called the Joint trail that led about a quarter mile through a crack 2-3 feet wide between 200 - 300 foot high rock walls.

The next day I took another long day hike (13 miles) and then spent the late afternoon climbing around and exploring the slickrock and redstone bluffs by the campsite.

The next stop was Moab where I planned to mountain bike a couple days and maybe do some rafting if the river was high enough and the weather warm enough.
I spent the first day in town sorting through tons of pamphlets from the visitors center, driving to the river to check out the water levels and driving around to several bike shops to pick out and reserve a bike. I ended up renting a Gary Fisher full-suspension one. Full-suspension was pretty much all that was available and the next two days I was to see why.

The first day I drove northeast out of town for a couple miles to the legendary "Slickrock" bike trail. Miles and miles of pink colored petrified sand dunes . I did the two mile practice loop before tackling the twelve mile main loop and was glad I did because biking in this terrain was nothing like I had ever encountered and I needed all the practice I could get.

I took a header over the handle bars in the first five minutes......and was really reconsidering whether I would do the main trail at all.... but ended up doing it and then, after re-supplying with water at the car, doing the practice loop in the reverse direction at the end of the day.

The terrain was about 98% slickrock with some sand in the gullies between "dunes". The first half hour I shifted gears a lot going up and down, but finally settled in riding most of the track in first gear. After one road up the side of a dune one invariably and almost immediately road down another side and upon reaching the bottom one invariably and almost immediately road up another dune. Sometimes the angle going down or up was so steep (+45 degrees) that one had to walk the bike because you didn't have enough traction - going up your rear tire would spin out, going down you'd fish tail and lose control. The rock was sandstone and sometimes had a fine layer of sand on it that would make it even slicker. Many times when riding down a steep slickrock, in order to keep weight as far off the front end as possible so as not to flip over the handle bars, I slid my torso back and behind the seat with my butt an inch above the rear tire and my chest flat and resting on the seat.

This day's biking was the most physically demanding and technically challenging thing I have even done. And, with the exception of accidents I've had, like going down on the freeway at 60 miles and hour and almost kissing a rattlesnake, it was the most dangerous thing I have ever done. But it was fun.

I eventually did find a flaw with the $2000 bike I was renting: Even though the front shocks were adjustable, you could only adjust the length of travel - not the stiffness. The several times that day and the next that I flipped over the handle bars happened when I hit the bottom of a hill or hit a bump when coming down a hill and the front shocks compressed and threw the weight forward - and me over handle bars . If I could have just stiffened the shocks, the shorter distance it traveled would not throw my weight off so easily. In the end I just had to shorten its possible length of travel and just compensate for the now skewed geometry that had more weight forward.

The next day (today) I and my rental bike took a shuttle out past the slickrock area to the Porcupine Rim trail which was also very difficult and challenging, though my first two falls were on easier terrain and I should have known better.

The first happened when I lost control on a gently sloping rocky spot and the handle bars snapped around and pinned my upper leg against the crossbar. I was in pain for about five minutes and I vowed to take it easier and be more cautious as this was my second day of hard riding and I was not up to peak performance, physically or mentally.

The vow did not last long, as I made a stupid move for my second accident. I was riding on some level and only slightly rocky terrain when I saw a rock about the size of a softball in the main track. It was easily avoidable, but somehow I hit it with my front tire and jackknifed and then my right foot came off the pedal and, as the pedal spun around with the force of my left foot, it hit the side of my shin hard. There was a lot of pain and a hard lump immediately and I was really worried I had broken one of the two bones down there.

But I could ride and I did, as it was mostly twelve miles downhill from there.

I thought the Hoo Koo E Koo trail in Marin was difficult and rocky. That was nothing compared to this trail. I was glad to have a full suspension bike. In the last three miles of single track you road only on the side of a canyon wall and had to always watch for rocks that could hit a pedal and send you flying - having to shift either pedal up at a moments notice, sometimes timing your strokes on uphills to miss the rocks up ahead.
I often opted to carry the bike over very difficult passages. The last quarter mile was about half riding and half walking or carrying it.

When I got to the Moab town library (where I'm typing this) I checked a copy of Gray's Anatomy and an online skeletal diagram to see if the bone I hit with my pedal was the big thick one or the smaller and thinner one. I figured that if it was the bigger one it probably wasn't broken. If it was the smaller, then maybe it was and I would go to a clinic and get it x-rayed. It was the bigger.

Tomorrow I go a little ways north of town to try to get a campsite at Arches National Park to do some more day hiking there. The river trip is out as the water is too low.