Moab, Utah. November 20-23, 2020
Little by little, I’m earning my mountain bike stripes in Moab. This Mecca for mountain biking is located in Utah, 355 miles from Denver, CO for Raul and 745 miles from San Clemente, CA for me. To get there I drove Friday 11/20 for about 12 hours.
Weather in this town changes drastically, spring and autumn are ideal dates to visit, summer is too hot and winter too cold, at least for nice weather tax state people like me. We visited in summer and it was hot, we earned our first stripe with Slickrock bike trail.
Saturday 11/21, we hired a shuttle service to take us to The Whole Enchilada trail head, as far as was available for us in this opportunity; you can start further up but not this time. About 20 riders line up and fill two vans; it is a service road, mainly dirt, I highly recommend using this service. Our driver was a short hair female blonde; other driver was male, wearing shorts and sandals with green toe nails, quite unique.
Temperature was 32f / 0c and I was wearing three layers of clothes by the time we had huge breakfast for about 10-15$ p/p. Later warms up if sunny, but it was that cold early morning, so you have the idea.
Eagle Eye was our starting point; about 40 min drive from Main Street, and from there, basically downhill to Colorado River for about 13 miles. Exposure to cliff, high speed section over rocky terrain and 1-2 foot drops makes this trail a black diamond to me, but all obstacles you can by-pass or walk, so is not considered a difficult trail at all. Trail runs parallel to cliff, so view stops you often, it is incredible and fun to watch. High speed section over rocky terrain hide few drops, you can clear all of them when landing is known but for first timers, we slowed and even stopped before attempting any of those, and often, choose to walk instead.
The Whole Enchilada got that name because is a combination of multiple trails, depending on starting point, the higher you get, more sections are added, that will be my best guess, other than love for Mexican foods and all flavors included in that meal, trail basically offers you multiple flavors as well.
We spotted few people doing rock climbing, impressive. Meanwhile a plane goes by the canyon at same altitude we were riding, that was awesome. When Colorado River is clearly visible, you are close to the end. Must interesting and challenging obstacles are in this section called Porcupine Rim. We crossed under road using a tunnel to connect with paved bike trail that bring us back to town to finish our ride, just one car left parking lot, so we smoked all other riders on our way down, at least the ones that shuttle with us, but other companies offers exactly same service, we saw two vans coming down on our way up.
We had a nice and warm lunch/dinner, we toasted for excellent ride with no casualties and went back to our room to study next day trail and edited our clips and share with all you people that follows our crazy rides.