Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Tag: Guacamole

Quick Weekender – Guacamole

Last weekend, Bill O’Neil and I got in a quick weekender in St George, Utah.  This is not our first rodeo for a roadtrip so most of the planning came down to the “You bring the usual, I’ll bring the usual.  Meet at the usual spot.   What time?”   So with all that intricate planning done we were headed north on Friday morning.

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We made really good time and were rolling through, Huricane, La Verkin and into Virgin by early afternoon.    The destination for the afternoon ride was Guacamole Mesa.  We had ridden here a couple of years ago and were itching to get back out here.   Above is the view from where we parked on the mesa.

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It was a fabulous day out in the low-mid 70s.   In the valley below is Dalton Wash Road that we came in on.

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View that don’t suck.    I love the nice combinations of singtletrack dirt trails, up/downs, slick rock, mesa views it just a great buffet of the stuff I love about this area.

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Near the south end of the mesa on the Holy Guacamole trail.  The trail names are all pretty cool and themed;  Margarita, Lime, Salt-On-The-Rim and of course Guacamole.

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More mesa goodness.

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A great time of the year to be out here.  Lots of the flora has thier springtime happy face on.

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Zion National Park is the backdrop to the north and east.

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There are some cool rock formations to ride through around and over.    The trail can be technical enough that the views can be thier own hazard.  Sometimes its best just to stop and take a look around.

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Riding on the slickrock (equestrians came up with that term – it really should be called griprock) is always fun and I enought the route finding aspet of following the trail.    Finding and chasing cairns is demension of riding out there that I find quite in enjoyable.

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Of course when you have a whole field of this stuff sometimes freeforming on the rocks are a ton of fun as well.    (There is a waldo in shot above).   After knocking out this ride we head over to Little Creek Mesa where we setup for camp for the next couple of days.  And enjoyed some tasty beverages and camp food.

Utah Weekend – Guacamole

This past weekend Bill O’Neil and I made a dash to Utah to get on some good red dirt and killer rock riding.    We were quite surprised that a storm had settled in the SoCal area the night before and brought in some much needed rain along with some snow at the higher elevations.   It was a mighty fine time to get the hell of Dodge.   The destination for day one was the Guacamole trails perched up on a mesa outside of Virgin, Utah.   After copious amounts coffee, beef jerky and a tank and change of fuel (burned at a highly uneconomical rate), we crossed into Utah to be greeted with storm clouds.   As we rolled through St George and Hurricane we were intermittently getting rained on but I had learned that in this neck of the woods if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes.  As we rolled through Virgin there were clear skies above and the dirt road that goes up to the mesa had just a puddle or two.

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It was a bit brisk and windy but beautifully sunny when we rolled out onto the first trail segment called Margarita. This was a new trail to me and I was stoked to check it out.

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It was not long before we juked onto the Salt on the Rim trail and got in some good views along with the sight of incoming weather.   Someone in Seattle once told me that there is no such thing as bad weather only bad gear.  We had the gear, but from the best we could tell it looked like this storm would pass us just to the south.

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We did end up get a little sprinkling on us as we made our way out to the main Guacamole Loop but it only lasted a few minutes.   What we were left with was straight up hero dirt.

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We took a connector trail called Lime (These trail names rock!) that went out to another loop called Holy Guacamole that took all the way to the southern tip of the mesa.  We had good views of Zion Nation Park as well as the north rim of Gooseberry Mesa from here.

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This is some fantastic single track with good technical challenges through amazing landscape with Zion National Park just a stones through away.

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In several spots the trail is literally along the park’s fence line.

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Holy Guacamole this is a fun trail!

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The Holy Guacamole goodness brought us back to the other side of the earlier loops we were on that eventually took us back to the trailhead.   This was some grade A trail awesomeness and it will certainly not be my last time riding on this mesa.   Shortly after we got off the mesa and headed back to St George we got into a good bit of rain.   We were pretty stoked at our window of fortune with the rain and we were particularly glad we had decided to get a hotel room for this trip vice our typical camping arrangements.  It was a mighty fine start to the weekend.