|
 Seven
years ago, I stumbled into Moab on Easter weekend with
a loaded bike rack and a pocketful of greenbacks. Call
it bad luck or blind ignorance, but I had no idea that
the annual jeep extravaganza was taking place that weekend.
That is, I had no idea until we accidentally joined a
parade of nearly 500 four-wheel drive vehicles on a slow-speed
trip through downtown Moab.
Unfortunately, we stayed with part of that parade for
the rest of the day, when we foolishly went to ride Poison
Spider, where the danger of being run over was greater
than that of spilling off the deadly Portal.
The following morning got no better after a bad breakfast
at Arches Diner, a bonus case of the runs and an afternoon
of uncomfortable hiking with a group of German tourists
in Arches National Park. When it was all said and done,
my pocketful of greenbacks was history, my bike had barely
been used, and I swore that my longstanding love affair
with Moab’s trails and surroundings was over. About
that same time, Schwinn put the Moab tag on a bike, Nike
put it on pair of shoes (with a slightly altered spelling),
BF Goodrich stuck it on a set of tires and Samsonite even
christened a garment bag with the four letters.
While everyone else was zoning in on the former uranium
boomtown, I looked elsewhere for my desert fix. I would
identify random squiggles on maps and push deep into the
San Rafael Swell and the empty quarter west of Blanding
in search of slot canyons. I would drive across dozens
of miles of washboard following a labyrinth of spurs created
by uranium miners. I would traverse places with names
like the Mussentuchit Badlands and the Moroni Slopes in
search of remote canyons. And there’s no doubt that
I found magic in some of those forgotten folds of the
Colorado Plateau.
I also started listening to ridiculous urges, and at one
point seriously considered packing up my wife and possessions
and moving to the tin-shack town of Hanksville. When people
asked if I’d ridden Slickrock on my recent trip
into the desert, I’d huff at them. “Moab,
hah, I haven’t been to that tourist trap in years,”
I would say, doing my best Edward Abbey imitation.
A couple weeks ago, my Abbey imitation was nowhere to
be found as I stumbled, head down, back into Moab. Not
only was I making a boomerang trip to the tourists’
paradise I’d sworn off of, I was making it in fairly
high season. I’d also agreed to a family-style getaway,
doing hikes that the infant could handle. Worst of all,
I’d submitted to spending the night, not in a motel
room, but in the affordable confines of a “cabin”
situated in an RV park. When we arrived, we saw that our
cabin consisted of a wood-paneled modular that was still
on wheels.
The following day, I broke out the maps and selected a
fairly rigorous hike up the steep escarpment of the Moab
Rim Trail. We rounded the first bend, and my worst fears
were chokng the redrock trail. While it was no Easter
weekend parade, a chain of jacked-up cars was struggling
near the steep edge of the rugged trail. As they pushed
against gravity and geology, the strain of engines, scrape
of metal and hoots and hollers of passengers could be
heard.
A father and son pair passed us in matching jeeps of different
colors. The good-natured pair waved as they crept by and
up a four-foot shelf of rock. The next jacked-up vehicle
was not so kind. Our waves were not returned by a stern-faced
man in flannel behind the wheel of a tricked-out Willy’s.
Just then, any notion of remoteness was dispelled when
he reached for the ring of his cell phone. As he climbed
the same ledge, a painful scrape gave way to a pop, and
the car began squirting motor oil all over the area’s
rock and flora. Too raptly engaged in his phone conversation,
he paid the pop no notice and instead left a black smear
much of the way down the “trail.”
I was still shaking my head as I tried to salvage the
day on a different nonmotorized trail. With the sun sinking,
I unloaded my two-wheeler at the Amasa Back trailhead
and started pedaling. The little Abbey on my shoulder
was still chuckling as I made my way up the long-technical
climb through a fairly steady stream of descending cyclists.
But roughly 100 yards from topping out, it was as if a
switch flipped. I passed a couple from Ontario walking
their bikes down the trail and at the same time, I crossed
the threshold. Suddenly, I was all alone on Amasa Back,
climbing a sparsely vegetated ledge, hundreds of feet
up a flawless wall of Wingate sandstone. As I crested
the top of the climb, the sun was setting on an impressive
canyon complex. Island in the Sky, the Maze and the White
Rim were all visible, and somewhere out there the Colorado
and Green rivers were meeting for the first time. The
trail took off down the Amasa Back, a narrow sandstone
formation falling nearly a thousand feet on each side.
My front tire eagerly carved a course through a sea of
petrified sand dunes, humping up steep sprints and gliding
through bowls and chutes of slickrock. I rode until I
couldn’t ride any further. The sun had dropped,
and I had long since seen my final cairn.
It was well after dark when I rolled back to the trailhead
and returned to Moab. I was never so happy to be back
in that town. Instead of shivering in the base of a canyon
and heating bulgar over a white gas flame, I capped the
day off with a pitcher of 3.2 microbrew and a couple slices.
And to be honest, crawling back into that modular cabin
never felt so good. In fact, I’m hoping they’ve
got a vacancy in coming weeks. I’ve got a date with
the Slickrock Trail. And I’ve been waiting about
seven years to make it.
-Will Sands |
