Courtenay and Josie in the USA 2007/2008: MTB'ing in Moab...

Hey everyone,
It's Friday now and Josie and I are physically drained - we have ridden for 5 days here in Moab, Utah, and although we are tired, we just loved it! We initially booked a 6 day camping and mountain biking tour, however that tour got cancelled due to a lack of numbers, so we just ended up doing days tours around the Moab area. It actually worked out really well because not only did it cost us less to do it ourselves, but we also got to do all the rides we were going to do on tour anyway :-)

We went through a mob called "Moab Cyclery" and they were awesome - we managed to check out 6 different rides in 5 days (did 2 in one day) which equated to about 140 miles/220kms of riding. Our legs are like pistons right now! Some pics of the rides below:

Josie & I posing on the Porcupine Rim Trail - Round Mountain in the background.

Ripping it up at the White Rim ride.

Josie and I riding up one of the hills at Slickrock

My favourite ride was definately Slickrock - its simply a place that is like nothing we have ever ridden - there are some steep sections but the rock is so grippy you can ride up almost anything - kind of ironic that slickrock is not actually slick (of course when it rains thats a different story!). Our ride at Slickrock was a bit of an adventure - one of the other riders (Wayne) with us had a crash and ended up dislocating a finger and chipping the bone - OUCH! So our guide (Tim) had to walk him, his bike and his own bike back to the car - at this stage we were about 9-10 kms out - so it would have been a LONG walk! Rather then walk, he just let us continue the ride which we were happy to do - at Slickrock you simply need to the follow the white lines on the rock - without them you would be hopelessly lost. Plus we were loving it! In the end we all got back to the car within 5 minutes of each other. After walking for about 30 minutes, Tim waved down a jeep on the trail and managed to put Wayne and his bike in the jeep. The jeep drove Wayne back to the car whilst Tim raced back also. By this time Josie & I were only a few minutes from the car also - so it was all good timing! :-)

Certainly one of the highlights was watching one the guides Merrick do a 15-20 foot drop. It was something we had never seen before "in person". Here are a couple of still shots of it - you won't catch me or Josie doing something like this...