Day 4: Rabbit Valley and the Western Rim

Rabbit Valley Trail and the Western Rim
GPS Data: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/29343598 (Check out the trail using the Google Earth plugin)

Today was a much better day. The wind had died down, the skies were clear and the sun was out. After going for our usual coffee stop and staring at a map, Jeff decided that we wanted to do the Western Rim trail. The trail was out a little bit from Fruita so we packed the car with all our stuff as we were going to drive to Moab right after we finished up the trail.

We parked pretty close to the highway as Jeff’s Subaru did not have the clearance necessary to drive any further down the road to the trailhead. The 4X4 trail was pretty uneventful but we were glad to finally be biking in good weather. The road was pretty flat which was good because as usual we would have a long ride ahead but there were a few sections of sand…which was not so great…but it was all rideable.

Awesome day, nice breeze, boring, sandy jeep road

We got to the first marker junction which the guy at the shop had described and could not see where any of the trails led. After consulting the map several times we just rode a little bit down the trail and there was a sign pointing towards the Western Rim trail. The trail towards the rim was extremely sandy and we were looking out for the Juniper tree that marked our turn. Apparently if we missed it we would go into a sandy pit that would have us “hating life”.

After making the turn, Jeff signalled that we had found the trail and it was time to light it up. The trail was AWESOME!!! It was super fun flowy single track along the rim of a Mesa. It was also slightly downhill which made it even better. It wasn’t super technical or really exposed but it was just awesome riding along the rim with a few small rollers thrown in (from dirt bike traffic) and a few small climbs. This was by far my favourite trail so far. The view from the rim was spectacular with mesas on the horizon and an awesome view of the Colorado river down below in the valley.

Western Rim

Then we got to a part in the trail where we met up with a couple other mountain bikers. We talked for a bit aobut bikes and such then they said they were going to do the Western Rim in reverse as they had never done if that way before and the jeep road back to the trailhead was really boring. Jeff wanted to push on a little more because we only had 1.5 hours of riding time or something and he wanted to get closer to 5. We went down a couple steeps and found a single track spur off one of the jeep roads. We decided to follow the single track for another hour and then turn back.

The single-track runs along the shelf between the cliff and the bushes.

We had all noticed that the trail really didn’t have a huge amount of elevation change and then all of a sudden on the second half we were pushing our bikes up super steep hills and riding back down the other. We did this for a little while until we followed a single track section down an old creek bed to a dead end at a railroad. We couldn’t find any more trails, so we turned back and followed the single track up…but this time we wanted to skip all the hike-a-bike so we followed the jeep trail back to where we started the single track.

After we got back to the single track junction we thought it’d be more fun to go back on the rim trail instead of the jeep trail so we geared up for a slightly uphill ride back to the junction. Surprisingly the ride back was a little slower but not nearly as slow as I thought it would be. The small rollers were definitely not as fun going the other way but I still enjoyed the awesome view going back the other way.

After getting to the junction we decided to follow some more of the coffee shop guys advice and ride the number 2 trail back to the car. The trail was really fast going back but pretty rocky with a few short steep descents thrown in. We then got to a point where the trail forked into a easy and hard section…we took the hard section of course and about 100 meters in we got to a super steep hike-a-bike...it was hard just pushing the bike up the trail let alone trying to ride it. After that,  it was another fast technical rolling double-track section back to the car.

When we got back to the car,  we were all feeling way better. The weather had held up…we all had a really fun time and Jeff seemed to be satisfied with the time on the trail. It was now off to Moab for the rest of the week.

- Kyle