The Epic

Well the term epic ride is thrown around alot, means different things to different people, but 7.5 hours in the woods counts as one for us. We concocted the ride plan last night, combining the two rides our new best friend at the bike shop showed us on the map even though he said we shouldn't try to do that. We headed down Provo Canyon in the Beast, took a right up past Sundance then another right on the first paved road and proceed to look for this parking area we were told about. After a couple mistaken stops, we found our spot, which I quickly proceed to mark on the GPS with a Waypoint in case things got ugly later. We quite easily found the first trail, not on the map originally but drawn in by our buddy. We got passed my a couple throttle twisters, motorcycles are allowed on most of the single track in this area, but the trail was in remarkably good shape for having them on it. The first climb was not bad at all, a couple miles, not quite 1000 feet, a couple checks of the map and were were in good shape. We found the Ridge trail and headed out along that, running into another group of mountain bikers at a really sweet vista

We headed across the ridge trail for a bit more then down Mud Springs trail, a fun downhill, loosing about 2000 feet. Parts of it were nice mellow downhills and parts were steeper, somewhat rutted and washed out from the moto's but all in all not bad at all and alot of fun. We ran into a couple more moto's on their way up, no big deal then caught up with a couple of horses, a dad and son. The first time Pooh saw them, dad was drinking a beer, the second time we caught them, after waihting a bit since they did not want to let us get by, dad was getting another beer outta the saddle bag. The trail finally widened enough that we could get around them and down to the creek at the bottom of the trail in the American Fork Canyon. This was where we started up the gravel road to the next half of the adventure. Other than the fact that this road seemed like an interstate for ATV's it was not a bad ride, middle ring climb for about 6 miles up a pretty canyon. We also saw a few jeeps, a few rock crawlers, and some pickups on the way up, and one stock grand cherokee with a couple of women in it that I think were in over their head. We caught up with a local on a mountain bike going for a geocache that steered us up the right road since it was not labeled the same as on our map. That ended the casual climb. I figured out what the rock crawlers were up there doing at that point. We passed a pretty well equipped Jeep, I would say 4" lift or so, 35" tires, heading up and even though we were in granny gear, we left them in our dust. Not quite Amasa Back, but a heck of a challenge in a four wheeled vehicle. Anyways, we went up this, riding the majority but walking some for a couple of miles and over 1000 feet of vertical. We finally hit the holy grail of trails, Trail 157 at about 8900 feet. We thought we would be all set at this point but obviously didn't check the contours on the map very well. Im not sure how long we hiked, but it was steep hike a bike and we picked up another 600 feet of vertical before it got ridable again.


This is where we were supposed to pick up the trail according to our buddy at the bike shop. The views were superb and we climbed a bit more but it was mostly ridable, amazing bench cut trail on both side of the ridge. At this point we were a good 4.5 hours into the ride, but just about 20 miles. The trail 157 rode quite nicely for the most part for the next few miles, there was pretty loose downhill section but ridable. We made it to the point where our buddy would have had us heading down off the ridge trail on Pot Hollow trail, but we need to continue on the Ridge trail to get back to the truck. I have not looked at the ride elevation profile yet, but we did a bunch of up and down, some ridable, some not over the next few miles. Darkness was starting to become a concern but we finally seemed to top out and from what I could see on the GPS and map it was mostly down hill back to the vehicle.


We came through the low point in the picture above, about 9200 feet. If you click on it and look at it in a bigger frame, you can see another singletrack heading the other way around this bowl.



We were starting to feel confident that we were gonna make it back to the truck before dark so we waited up for howie to take a few pictures at this point. We had one more small navigational SNAFU starting down a trail that we thought might be correct but figured out it was wrong so back up we went and down (and a little up) the right trail till we hit the correct downhill back to the truck. It was "only" 27 miles but a long day in the woods. The one climb was 3000 feet itself so Im sure the total climb was well over 5000 feet but have not checked out the elevation profile yet, Pooh bear forgot to bring his GPS that tracks total elevation gain. Since we didnt have anything for dinner at the camper, we hit the mexican restaurant in Heber city, luckily it was open on a Sunday nite.