Visions of Grandeur: Heaven and Hell on Two Wheels

On a bikepacking trip through cental Utah’s canyon country, my friends and I discovered we each had our own version of hell. 

Sandra's emerged on Day Two, in between the Abajo Mountains and State Road 211. At the bottom of a dozen miles of single-track that ended in a series of sandstone drops, we encountered our first significant sand traps of the trip. It didn't matter that these lay along a burbling creek fringed by cottonwood trees with their leaves burning orange and gold. After several long sections of sand so deep it suctioned our tires into its grains and caused our 60-pound bikes to swivel, I heard my normally gleeful, delightfully potty-mouthed friend curse the sand with expletives.

Emily's hell also arrived on Day Two, only it was sparked by the bike she’d borrowed, with no shock in the front or back. Though specially designed for bikepacking, it made her sit bolt upright like the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.” You could see her aggravation in the way her shoulders crept toward her ears and her face squished into a squint as she pedaled through the sand.

Natalie's hell wasn’t so easy to decipher. At a late-afternoon snack stop on Day One, she said: "My hell is this. The entire trip.”

And mine reared its ugly head just an hour after our departure. 

It engulfed me after we started riding from Natalie and her husband Dustin’s gear shop/outfitter, Roam Industry, in Monticello. In our excitement, we were all practically sprinting. Within 30 minutes, I was starting to feel like crap; my legs burned with lactic acid, the blood shunted away from my arms and my lungs started to sear from a combination of exercise-induced asthma and pedaling the heaviest bike I’d ever ridden. 

Even before we hit dirt, I was starting to doubt myself a little, and then, as we rounded corner after corner of road that climbed relentlessly toward Cooley Pass, I began to falter. I’m a seasoned hiker, Nordic skier and cyclist, and I’d been pounding miles of singletrack five days a week in preparation for this trip. But now I started doing the most pathetic thing someone with big cycling dreams can do. I stopped. I dismounted. And I pushed my tank up the road. 

Shame wracked me — or maybe it was my plummeting blood sugar. And after one, possibly two minutes, I thought: maybe I bit off too much this time. Maybe I can’t DO this. 

At just that moment, Natalie — part guide, part all-around badass and executive director of the Utah Tourism Industry Association — transformed into a dirt-riding Mother Teresa. “Sure you can! Look at you!” she said. (Oh, yeah. A has-been. I mean a never-was, I thought). We alternately walked and pedaled for what seemed like miles, and then it appeared: Cooley Pass and the road beyond it. All it took from there was three miles of downhill coasting with a cool October wind blowing on my face to make me smile. 

Good thing, because who in her right mind would let a little shame, physical agony and embarrassment keep her from exploring the route that was planned? It wove 250 miles through three national monuments, one national recreation area, one national park and a patchwork of United States Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management lands. It would take us through tunnels of sandstone, to the edge of yawning canyons, past ancient petroglyphs and down to the Colorado River. And best of all, it connected to the brand new Western Wildlands Bikepacking Route, which starts at the border of Canada and ends at Mexico, snaking through some of the most beautiful and fascinating parts of Utah.   

The Lure of Empty Dirt Roads

We would not let my weakness slow us, that’s who. Never mind that before we embarked, we didn’t really know each other. I mean, I knew Sandra Salvas and Emily Hefel, and Sandra knew Natalie Randall and me, but Natalie only knew Sandra and Emily only knew me. Yet we’d joined together out of a shared love for cycling and a wish to truly social distance in month six of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were lured by the empty dirt roads we’d travel, by the isolated campsites we’d find, by the promise of mystical, arch-littered canyons. And by the tantalizing thought of escaping the current political climate, the immediacy of the virus and a deep desire to explore a vast swath of central Utah by our favorite mode of transportation: bikes. 

Enter Natalie’s suggestion to ride part of the 700-mile Bears Ears Loops in south-central Utah. The loops are part of the Western Wildlands Bikepacking Route, a 2,700-miler. Bikepacking Roots founder Kurt Refsnider pioneered them, but Natalie says the thrill of bikepacking is that there are always route variations that yield opportunities for everyone to curate their own experience. (Read: "Three Utah Bikepacking Routes for Beginners to Intermediates")

That’s what we were doing: blending singletrack, OHV trail, dirt roads and pavement into an experience that answered our needs for adventure. So in a way, we were curating this trip for ourselves, building on our own wishes. The region we were about to ride into is a bucket list for many travelers, but bikepacking offers a whole different world of opportunities. 

By the time we reached our first night’s camp, we’d ridden 27 miles and climbed 3,500 feet by way of pavement, dirt road and OHV road. When we arrived, it was howling wind and there were hardly any flat spots to pitch our tents. What’s more, the flame on our stove kept sputtering out, forcing us to choke down lukewarm packets of Trader Joe’s Madras lentils as the wind screamed louder. Never mind that we’d burned thousands of calories and would burn thousands more in the days to come. 

But food wasn’t our priority. Pedaling for visions of grandeur was, and we were about to get one. As the curry burps set in, the sun set, casting an orange glow behind the Bears Ears. They’re so distinctive that in each of the four Native languages spoken in the region, their name is the same. A historic consortium of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute and Zuni nations united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears cultural landscape, an ongoing challenge. As we stood awestruck in their presence, I knew we were viewing something special. And getting my first glimpse of them by bike made the vision even better. 

Undulation. Or: Some Days the Trail Leads Downhill

On Day Three, I woke up feeling like the luckiest person alive, knowing that all I had to do for the next few days was ride my bike. My sole responsibilities were hydrating, eating and slathering myself in Coppertone 50. After I’d narrowly survived hell’s flames, I’d promised to maintain a positive mental attitude no matter how steep the roads climbed or how sandy they became. For someone with three kids, this was exceptionally simple, especially because I was with the three most laid-back women I’d ever met. Sandra and I had known each other since we’d both been on the masthead at Skiing magazine, weathering challenges such as trying to be interested in pro skiers. Later, we went to a Rainbow Family gathering, collecting scenes of things like me failing to be accepted into the drum circle ("But we did eat from a dumpster, so that was brave," she says). And we’d been on assignment together as I tried to overcome my fear of exposure (would not and will never happen) and she worked her hardest to make me a mountaineer while also counseling my mental breakdown.

Not once in 72 hours had Sandra and I, or any combination of Natalie, Sandra, Emily and I, had a moment of tension. Which led me to conclude that if hell is a trip marred by conflict, we were in actual heaven. 

After pulling ourselves away from Cathedral Butte, we were cruising along an old mining road with soaring views back into the country we’d traveled. With time to kill — or so we thought — I asked Natalie for a history lesson. She said the roads through the area were built in the late 1800s to help cattlemen move the herds between summer and winter pasture, and support a variety of other industries, such as timber and mining.

The region is now a patchwork of public lands, owned by the U.S. Forest Service, BLM, Utah State Parks and the National Park Service, as well as the Navajo Nation. In an introduction to bikepacking course Natalie and Dustin teach for the University of Utah, students read about the thorny topic of bikes in wilderness. Fortunately, we could access all kinds of beauty from roads, which we’d ride from this point forward. 

Many new wilderness areas are being established in places already impacted by humans. While keeping out motorized access will help preserve these areas, restricting bike travel — one of the fastest-growing outdoor activities — might be pointless if it shuts down access to large tracts of land.

Today’s ride took us from canyon rim down into aspen and cottonwood-cloaked valley. Cold wind washed over us as we blasted through yellow-leafed hallways. At our lunch stop, we braced against tree trunks to stretch, napped briefly on the sun-warmed ground and nibbled summer sausage and Babybels. Then we geared up for yet another climb on our way to our third camp, in a dispersed campsite along the Elk Ridge Scenic Backway. We set up on yet another perch overlooking Bears Ears. 

Later, as the nightfall (and the cold) gripped us, Dustin and Natalie’s 3-year-old son, Roman, surprised us with pizza. That’s one of the beauties of the route we’d chosen: you can make all, most or some of it self-supported. Or you can just weave in a little comfort. This was our coldest night so far, and cold dinner could have made it awful. Instead, the pepperoni was greasy and the sodas were syrupy. We slept like rattlesnakes in winter in our sleeping bags, the dirt layer on our bodies offering extra warmth.

Want to know a bonus to riding a route as undulating as the Western Wildlands? After days of climbing, sometimes you just go down. That was our Day Four — miles of flying through more forest before cruising into a plateau above the Colorado River and down to Hite Marina. 

Sandra and Natalie had dropped a gear cache and booked us a night in an RV in Ticaboo. When we rolled in, the caretaker — a crack-up with a gravelly voice named Katie — met us after hours at the little convenience store onsite. We wanted what any right-minded group wants when caked in dirt, undernourished, dehydrated and, technically, “on vacation” — one, maybe several, frosty beers. To our dismay, the store carried none. But glorious Katie delivered, producing a 12-pack of Bud, leading us to our RV and bidding us a cheerful goodnight. 

It seemed to take about seven hours to clean off the dirt caked into the sunscreen I’d smeared on my calves. Two more hours raced by as we detailed our bikes. Four hours later, it was still somehow only 7 p.m., and we cooked some pasta and cracked a few beers. The RV shower melted our muscles, the wine Emily brought complimented the beer and a solid night’s sleep in an actual bed almost prepared me for the palm-sized wolf spider that crawled off my backpack strap onto my neck at Zero Dark Thirty the next morning. Okay, it didn’t prepare me. I screamed. I slapped it to the floor. And we all danced as if on hot coals until we put the poor spider permanently to sleep.