South Skyline trail

Well we finally headed up to the Ogden area to ride one of the skyline trails. We headed down to Salt Lake City, then up I15 to Ogden, then up Ogden Canyon to Pineview Reservoir. I was still feeling the effects of yesterday's ride, more mental than physical but my legs were less than fresh as well. I quickly found myself breaking our first rule of riding with our group, no whining, so I shut up and got ready for the ride. We had the route downloaded on the gps from a website so at least route finding should be easy. We found the start of the trail, a silly steep 30 yards or so, not a good omen. But the grade quickly leveled out to a more reasonable pitch that I could keep a good spin going at 1-3 or so. The two miles covered 800 feet, more than reasonable as we have determined over our trips that a grade of about 500 feet per mile is about all that we want to climb on a sustained basis. For those of you that ride Rothrock, thats about the over all pitch of lower Sassafrass but throw in the elevation and its tough. I found myself needing to stop at that point and eat a bar. Another mile of slightly more pitch and we were at the first big overview of the Ogden valley, like a "agrarian quilt." We had about a half mile of up and down then the sustained climb started again, topping out at 8000 feet, 3000 feet higher than when we started. We had the opportunity to take a 2 mile out and back to Lewis Peak, about 200 more feet of climbing, but Pooh was "finished with climbing" so we passed, because it is All About Pooh around here. There was also a minor issue about timing as we need to pick up Ho at the airport at about 7. We had slight climb to the final peak before we headed down. The first section was down along the ridge, nice views but a rather loose tread. From there it got steeper and stayed loose. There were some opportunities to catch some air over roots but without any knowledge of the trail and what the landings might be, I took them rather conservatively. We also ran into a couple of hikers on their way up and soon realized why as there was a major trail head parking at the end of the section. We felt a little jiped as we didnt seem to get enough downhill for all the stinkin climbing we did. From that trail head we headed down an old double track that was probably more single than double. Pooh was first down, stopped at one point and yelled back at me something unintelligible so I slowed down a bit and quickly realized he was trying to warn me about a dead deer laying right across the trail, YUCK! We got howie stopped in time and around it. Some more double track some of which was quite rutted then we hit pavement. A couple miles on pavement and found the pineview res. trail. It was sort of an overgrown rail trail with some wide bridges that ran around the edge of the water back towards the trail head, nothing to write home about about but better than the alternative major highway. It put us back on the highway at one point and Pooh decided to just ride pavement back while howie and I took the mowed path that kind of continued around the water. It ran us into a boat launch area about a half mile from the the truck and we took a look for its continuation across the parking lot. We found two trails and took the better looking of the two but that just took us down to the water. The reservoir was kind of low so we decided to just ride the edge which seemed reasonably firm around to the truck. At one point near the end, we found out later that Pooh was able to see us, we had to hike a little bit as the water went around a little point. Pooh apparently found great humor in this and got some strange looks from others in the lot as, apparently, he was about crying he was laughing so hard. We had run out of recovery drink mix after yesterday so all we had was cokes. It was about 4 or so and we were starving so we stopped at some Italian fast food place in Ogden on our way back to the interstate and had a "snack" of pizza. We were in good shape to hit the Radio Shack, I need some pieces parts for the video camera set up, and then make it to the airport by 7 to pick up Ho. That was before we hit the back up due to a lane closure. We got a call from Ho that he was on the ground and we let him know we would be a bit late. We got up to the next exit and decided to take surface roads around for a bit and between my maps and Pooh's gps we got around and back to the interstate before the exit for the airport. We found Ho pretty easily but were tempted to see if any of the nice looking ladies needed a ride instead. Back on the road, we stopped at Radio Shack, english was not the first sales guys primary language, he was watching soccer on the dish. I found what I need on my own and got outta there pretty quickly. Back on the interstate headed for camp, we decided to hit the mexican place for dinner then a quick stop at the grocery for breakfast stuff and back to show Ho his home away from home for the next little bit. We got ahold of the folks from Harrisburg and set a time for breakfast in the morning.