2020’s Trip in 2021
In January or February of last year, I signed up for a DIY frame bag making class. In so doing, I met a new friend (a few really, but one in particular), Matt. I saw that the location of the class was near my house … at another house. Matt was involved with the bike collective I had started to go to and was looking into volunteering with. I wondered how we had not known each other for the last 2+ years, but was glad we had met. We were looking into doing a trip in part of the southern Utah desert, not far from Green River. It’s an area known as the San Rafael Swell. Well, COVID-19, 2020 etc. happened and that (as well as a number of other potential trips) did not happen.
So, with vaccines and lowering case numbers, we went ahead with it this year. It was just Matt and myself though. Finally, it was happening!!! … ???
Yes, It was Happening!
We prepared ourselves physically by getting out on some specific rides, both loaded and unloaded. We made our gear lists and determined the things we could share (first aid kit, poop trowel, battery pack, etc.) and the things we would want to have two of (e.g. 2 pumps). We watched the forecast the week before very closely. We had to use local towns as proxy, but those towns were showing temps in the 33F - 65F for our two planned riding days. Just what we hoped for and expected.
The temps were important as we decided to carry all our water for the two days instead of riding extra and filtring mineral-heavy water. Having been down to the same area for a different event a week before this trip, I was expecting it to be similar. That week had been in the high 60’s and that felt very warm to me (mainly due to exposure). So, I was planning to haul 9 liters of water with me. That’s quite a bit of water weight, but I figured “you can always dump some out” to reduce weight. Of course, day 1 was the day with most of the climbing and you are not going to toss water on day 1 of 2. I even resolved to take two insulated bottles (read heavier for the amount of water they carry) because I might want some cool water later in the trip/day.
Anyway, we had our gear ready and the weather looked good so … let’s go!
OK, Game On! … Right?
Thursday the 15th came and we headed out mid-afternoon …
First Night, Recent Reports
Driving down and getting closer, we were expecting the clouds from where we lived further up North to clear. They didn’t clear as we expected. We could see precipitation in spots ahead of us wondering and trying to decipher if it was where we would be going. We verified that we both saw the same reports and that there was no rain or snow in them. I tried to pull up a report here and there, but coverage was getting spotty. There was some drizzle in Green River going away soon and Hanksville looked clear (another of our proxy cities). We arrived at the camp area around 6:30 PM Thursday night. There were RVs there with some tents and other folks around. Matt spotted some other bikepackers. As we walked around assessing the damper-than-expected dirt and commenting on the cool temps, I got to setting up my tent. We also chatted with the other intrepid bikepackers. They were doing a bigger loop than what we planned to (Stonehouse Lands,link a little later), but had to bail out as they were getting snowed on and experiencing white-out conditions. Their bikes were fairly muddy, but they had cleaned themselves up some by that point. They were going to warm up in their truck then set up their tent. We chatted with the briefly, but mostly decided to let them go be comfortable after a hard day out in unexpected conditions.
We resovled to just go to bed and see how things looked in the morning. We felt that if it didn’t rain or snow overnight, we’d be good. Additional moisture though meant we might have to go look elsewhere for a place to ride and salvage the trip.
Frosty Start
Friday AM came and it was a chilly start. There was just a little bit of moisture. The ground was decent, but it was also cold, which helped firm it up. We had talked about taking a short ride up the road unloaded, but next thing I knew Matt was loading his bike up. We resolved to just load up, head out and come back if things looked or got really bad. By about 8:30, we were making the final checks and were on the road around 8:40. Two other bikepackers intent on doing the longer loop the other two got bounced from (Stonehouse Lands) had just rolled up in a truck. They were from Hawaii and on rented Surly Wednesdays with what looked like a pretty heavy load.
As for my Surly Wednesday, it had a frosted seat early that AM 
, but by this time I had sorted that out.
We pedaled out keeping an eye on the weather. The trail condition was decent, no sinking or slipping and no mud caking on the tires. Just some light precipication going on. We both had on our pants and windbreakers/rain jackets, which did just fine in the light precipitation.
Plucky Optimism or Obstinant Grit?
I would not use ‘optimistic’ to describe my demeanor recently, generally or even now as I write this. Somehow though, despite the foreboding weather, I was nothing but optimistic about how things would shake out. The rain spat on us (never anything more than a drizzle) as well as some minor sleet and snow flurries, but I just noted the mostly hero dirt we were riding on. No peanut butter mud to be encountered and some pretty spectacular views came up quickly as we rolled through the early miles.
I did recognize that my ‘optimism’ could also just be obstinance in which I refused to let this trip be canceled and we’d see it through … no matter how painful. It seemed something other than that though. I just had this good feeling that it would work out. We chatted lightly about it and made comments about the potential and the need to keep an eye on things, but never made a hard decision.
We spent a good bit of time hike-a-bike after a number of miles. Prior to the hike-a-bike (HAB) section (steep and bumpy), we had ridden a bumpy descent and one of my hose-clamped fork cages was loose. I stopped to fix it and Matt carried on. We seemed to have developed a good rhythm of catch-up and leap-frog where we don’t have to ride next to each other the whole time. I think that’s good for not getting sick of a fellow rider. As I finished fixing the cage (and adding some Vole straps for good measure), I caught a glimpse of our friends from Hawaii coming up behind me, but I was soon back on my may and didn’t see them again for a while. A jeep also came up behind me and eventually passed me, both of us moving pretty slow on a somewhat technical climb.
Below are some pics from that this early bit of riding:
Yes, Game On!
I caught up to Matt and he had been waiting a few (maybe 10) minutes for me ahead. We snacked, chatted and got rolling again. Before long, we were hike-a-biking again and coming up on this cabin/shed thing. It was roughly noon. We stopped and ate something approximatig lunch (meaning just a bunch of snacks). I dug into my jerky and some other food while there. We chatted more seriously about whether or when we make the call to commit or turn back and salvage the trip some other way. Again, my optimism (or obstinance) shined on through. Matt wasn’t leaning necessarily one way or the other. He was just was hesitant about being caught out in the desert during rain or snow. I had some of that hesitancy, but had this feeling that we just had to get through today and tomorrow would be all we dreamed it to be. I had no facts or data to offer, but Matt went with my optimism and we committed ourselves. We pedaled a little more earnestly and the sky cleared a bit as we continued riding. We still noted the dark spots in the sky that would pontentially mean trouble later that day or tomorrow, but now we were committed.
Hike-a-Bike and PB Mud
A little before we turned North around Hidden Splendor, we had a big climb right after a fun descent. It was steep and it didn’t take long for us to be HAB’ing again. We HAB’d it all the way to the top. During this hike up, we caught sight of our friends from Hawaii for the last time. They were approaching the steep part shortly after we had gotten off the bikes to push. It appeared one of them had stopped to wait for the other. We later commented on how much mud their fat tires must have picked up in that section.
I found a potential souvenir to take home with me, but opted to leave it on the side the trail; I figured I was following leave-no-trace principles as well as dont-carry-an-extra-12-pounds-for-no-good-reason principles. I assume someone had a bad day with their 4WD out here previously.
We grunted our way to the top, encountering some of the dreaded mud on the way. It wasn’t constant, but it was noticeable. The descent though, that was skethchy! Matt started the descent first as I finished snacking. I’m usually a faster descender too, so I wanted to give him a solid lead. I was glad neither of us went down as we rutted our tires through peanut butter mud mixed with rocks. There was one section of this green coated mud that was particularly bad. As I came up on it, I could see where Matt’s plus tires had plowed through. I decided to cut hard right out of the mud off the edge of the trail into a rocky section. I prayed my already muddy tires didn’t slide on the rocks and my prayers were fortunately answered. We both made it down to the turn, regrouped and pedaled through a largely flat section. Problem was this flat section had seen snow the day before and was pretty muddy. Good news though, the sun was out somewhat now!
Despite the flatness, we ended up walking a bit of this section due to the mud. Matt seemed soemwhat worried about the mud and how much of it might be ahead. I was still in it’ll-all-be-fine mode. We had seen hikers footprints as we went thinking this was really remote for hiking and that someone must have vehicle support to be out hiking this remotely. We came across and Outward Bound group eventually at the iconic rusted car photo op location. They had been the footprints we had seen.
We chatted very briefly with them and asked them about the road condition. They couldn’t speak to it though as they had been in there 6 days … 6 days!?!?! Yep, that’s pretty hard-core, mainly because it means filtering some sketchy water from wherever you can find it.
More Mud and Tired Legs, Grinding Out The Day
We carried on, eventually turning somewhat East (I think) up ahead. We still stuggled with intermitten mud. Between the flat section and the incline we were on now, I had my tire lockup. My Bluto fork has a fender/mud guard in it and there’s not a ton of clearance there. Enough mud built up to lock it up twice.
By this time we were in 20+ mile range for the day and A LOT of climbing. We still had some climbing to do though. Our legs were getting pretty tired at this point. Things were less scenic and the clouds were encroaching again. So, we chatted about where/when to stop. I wanted to get to 30 miles or close to it at least.
We settled on 30 miles or 6 PM as the point-in-time when we’d become less picky about finding the right camp site. Matt had originally wanted to get to the McKay Flats turn by the end of the day. I figured we could, but would also blow ourselves up in the process. In the end, I think we could have stopped sooner. At a minimum, it was good we didn’t try to push to McKay Flats for a number of reasons.
We checked out a few BLM pull-out’s, but nothing had much coverage (more commonly RVs use the pull-outs). Matt had a bivvy sack and I had my little tent, so I deferred more to where Matt felt comfortable. We settled on this spot at about 32 miles in and with clouds and some wind threatening again. We got set up just in time for some more sleety snow, the worst we had experienced all day. My optimism was being tested now and flagging just a little. I was hungry, tired and facing the down-turn in weather just as we were halfway out and fully committed. We had over 4800 feet of climing in our legs by this point (fully loaded with gear and all our water for the trip). Anyway, we got camp set up, got some dinner in us and fidgeted around waiting for it to actually get dark, so we could climb in and go to bed. There wasn’t any sunset to watch with the overcast skies. We took a couple brief walks around to keep body temps up before going to bed.
Day 2
Rarely do you sleep great camping and this was no exception, even with as tired as we were. Still, we had rested and our legs generally felt OK.
Cold Start
While our legs felt generally OK, our hands were really cold since it was around 20F out. At least that’s what Matt’s little keychain thermometer thing was saying. And it was definitely cold, so I’m not going to argue too much. Immediately getting dressed, I put no nitrile gloves under my mid-weight gloves. I think this saved me a bit of pain. I also did as much breakdown etc with my gloves still on. Matt eventually borrowed my second pair of nitrile gloves to put under his wool mid-weight gloves, but his hands were already really cold. Either way, we were ready to roll.
I had on every bit of clothing I brought except my shorts. I put my puffy on under my rain jacket/wind breaker. I was OK moving around like that but was curious how it would be on the bike. Would the wind get to me or would I overheat quickly on our gradual climb out?
We struck out toward Mckay Flats, eventually making our turn there (the shorter route to the right, which is what we took). I noted for the future that that would be a good water cache/stash spot.
The terrain was more sparse, but we started to catch glimpes of some small mountains and features out on the horizon. Things slowly warmed up too. We started to slowly shed our layers, but we also had some descending to do, so we didn’t shed too much.
The Weather I Expected
Day two (aside from the 20F start) was turning out to be the weather I had expected and hoped for on both days. We were getting back into some more scenic and enjoyable riding. The mostly downhill riding was obviously much more fun than the previous day. We did deal with some head and cross winds earlier on day 2 though. We stopped and took pics at another rusted out car and another cabin. We guessed mostly right at the turns/forks we came across, not hearing the Buh-Bahm from RideWithGPS. The route we were following around Temple Mountain was a little circuitous and I posited that it was likely more of just a recorded route than a planned route … at least this portion of it. The final confusion was at this little mine area, where it wanted us to climb up for a small sight-seeing excursion. We opted to just take the more direct route.
Brining It Home
The last little bit was some of the most fun the trail had to offer. Having shed a lot of the water weight and rolling down hill, I started to pop and jump off of some smaller undulations in the trail. It was over quick then and we were back at the parking lot/car. With only 1400 feet of climbing, an earlier start and quite a bit of descening, Saturday’s riding went much faster.
Other Post and Assorted Photos
Here’s some other assorted photos from the trip, but first the link to Matt’s blog post. IMO, his photo-taking is better, as is his writing.
