Spring Break

For many years, we had a tradition of going to Moab for spring break, to enjoy the warmer weather, sunshine, and drier trails than were available in the Denver area.  It was great: we'd get the first sunburns of the season, the first saddle sores, the first wobbly legs from pushing hard on a long bike ride.  This year, we got the chance to revive that tradition and introduce it to Cailan.

We left our house on Saturday morning, not so early that we couldn't have a nice French toast breakfast but not too late either.  We wanted to arrive in Moab with plenty of time to find a campsite, a task that we were worried could be difficult, since it was the weekend of the annual Moab Skinny Tire Festival.  Fortunately our location gives us a headstart on all those Denverites, and by 11:00 we had found a campsite by the Colorado River and were setting up our tent.  We gave Cailan and Utah strict admonitions about going too close to the river's edge - one of them listened. After a picnic lunch, we set out for the trails.

We went to a fairly new area called the Moab Brand Trails, a trail system with several loops of varying degrees of difficulty. In a very uncharacteristic move, I didn't buckle on my bike shoes and slap my helmet on my head; instead, I found myself tying on my running sneakers. I am getting ready for my first half-marathon in April, and I really needed to do a long run this weekend to stay on top of my training schedule. Chris and Cailan geared up for a ride on the big yellow tandom, and we all headed out in the same direction, heading along the EZ Trail toward the Bar M loop. Chris and Cailan soon pulled ahead of me, though they paused a couple times to give me a drink from a Camelbak and to snap a picture.

I saw them again after another mile or so. They had stopped near the junction of EZ and Bar M to look for a geocache. I grabbed another sip of water and kept moving. It was a gorgeous day: sunny and somewhere in the mid-60s, a very comfortable temperature for running. The scenery was spectacular. From the Bar M trail I could see many of the rock formations in Arches National Park, as well as the La Sal mountains. The EZ trail was narrow and windy, a soft dirt surface studded occasionally with rocks. The Bar M trail was wide and hard-packed with many sections of slickrock. Both were fun to run on, and the trail system is well marked, with signs at every trail junction and trail maps at many of the intersections.

After I'd gone about four miles, I started to wonder why I hadn't seen Chris and Cailan again. They had been planning to ride the Bar M loop also, and even though Cailan doesn't pedal very hard, they can easily outpace my running speed. But they had several geocaches to hunt for, not to mention any lizards, rocks, flowers, or sticks that caught Cailan's attention, so I wasn't too surprised. At 5.5 miles, I could have taken a cut-off trail back towards the parking area, then caught the Lazy trail to get back to the truck, but I decided to stick to the Bar M, so the boys wouldn't get worried if they didn't catch me. In retrospect, I wish I had taken that left turn, because after 6 miles, the Bar M trail stopped being quite so fun. The trail surface alternated between soft loose dirt and deep sand, and the trail went up and down a series of gullies - each up started to feel longer and steeper than the last one. Eventually the trail curved around to the left, turned into a gravel road with a long gradual climb, and was parallel to the highway; it was not nearly so scenic and at a point in the run where I really could have used some distraction to keep me going.

At 8.25 miles I was back at the parking lot, and Chris and Cailan weren't there. I called Chris and, after a couple of missed calls due to bad reception, learned that he was on the Bar M trail, at the top of one of those gullies, with a pinch flat. He'd unpacked his spare tube, only to discover that it also had been the victim of a pinch flat. He opened his patch kit, and found one lonely patch left - not enough to fix the two holes left by a pinch flat. I couldn't do anything to rescue him - I didn't have any keys to the truck. I couldn't even ride my bike to them, because my bike was locked on the roof rack, and Chris had the only keys. Fortunately, on a spring weekend in Moab, you don't usually have to wait long to meet someone else on the trail, and soon he had met a couple bikers with a well-stocked patch kit.

Cailan kept himself busy during the tire change by taking pictures with Chris's camera. I think when they finally got back to the truck, he had taken over 100 pictures, including a couple dozen shots of Utah (including a few that were in focus), countless pictures of dirt, a nice series of Chris in action with the bike pump, and some self portraits.

We all had water and snacks, then we pulled my bike down from the roof, I changed shoes and plopped my helmet on, and the four of us took a spin on the EZ Lazy loop. This was about 3.5 miles of easy but fun trail, a few bumps to go over and some nice swoopy downhill singletrack. At least, I think it would have been easy if I hadn't just finished an eight-mile trail run. My legs felt a bit like jelly. Back at the parking lot again, Chris unloaded his single bike and went to look for a little more challenging trail. Cailan and I hung out near the truck, casting spells with our magic wands (which closely resemble drumsticks) and collecting magic rocks. I'm not sure what exactly was magic about the rocks, but we sure did find a lot of them. The sun started to disappear early as it sunk behind some rock towers in the west, casting our play area into shadow and sending me to the truck to dig up long pants and a sweatshirt. When Chris returned, we loaded up and drove into town to buy a patch kit and a spare tube and enjoy dinner at Eddie McStiff's..

Then we went to our campsite along the river and started to get ready for bed. Of course, we had time to cast a few more spells in the dark, before retiring to our tent.