Moab mountain biking & Canyonlands National Park, Utah – July 19th & 20th

On Friday July 19^th we picked up our wonderful hire bikes from Poison Spider Bikes in Moab, and were very impressed – for a decent price for the whole day we got some pretty flash bikes, dual suspension and really good condition, pretty much new with a couple of scratches, and MUCH better than any hire bikes we’d seen elsewhere back home or in New Zealand!

It was a pretty hot day, as usual for Moab I get the impression, so we tried to head off pretty early, but by the time we actually registered at our campsite and booked in for another night, had breakfast, picked up the bikes and adjusted them, and drove to the mountain biking park, it was probably about 9:30am and getting pretty warm.

Moab has some awesome trails, and there are so many different trail parks to choose from! So to get somewhere where we could both ride, rather than super beginner trails for me or scarily technical ones for Lawrie, we went to the nearby (a few miles out of town) Bar-M trail park, and had lots of fun riding trails such as ‘Lazy’ and ‘EZ’, among others – then I went back to do some of the easier ones again while Lawrie tried out some more technical trails including some on Slickrock, and I rode back to town on the great asphalt cycleway that goes all 13km back there – that was when we both discovered how HOT it was and maybe it wasn’t such a good idea hanging out in the sun for that long! So after Lawrie got back with the car and we returned the bikes, we went back to Denny’s for a lovely lunch, and then back to the crowded pool at our campsite – MUCH needed and appreciated, as was the nap in the shade by the pool after that!

Me with the awesome bikes we hired

One of the 'base model' bikes we hired

Some of the much easier bit of track

One of the reasons we weren't really keen to fall off!

Lawrie excited about riding on Slickrock!

Much needed air conditioning and naughty late afternoon lunch at Dennys...

After recovering from almost heatstroke, particularly in Lawrie’s case, we headed back to Arches National Park to hike to Delicate Arch at sunset, then the next day we headed to Canyonlands National Park in the morning before getting on our way to Denver, Colorado.

Canyonlands National Park is really close to the town of Moab as well, but we didn’t particularly feel the urge to get up for sunrise as we’d previously thought, at the Mesa Arch in the park. But we did head to there and several other lookouts in the park – it was most likely pretty amazing, but by that stage we’d nearly had enough of looking at different rock formations, and definitely had enough of the hot sun! (Sound familiar Megan & Justin?!) So we wandered around for quite a while then got back on the road to Colorado – quite a road too!

Part of Canyonlands National Park

Not the typical sunrise view of Mesa Arch, but how we saw it - that is a BIG drop into the canyon under the arch...