Opps, outta order

Im updating finally with a good internet connection, but missed last thursday so here it is as I had written it but not been able to put it up.

Well today was to be the Virgin River Rim trail ride. This was the first time that I actually saw howie try to talk us outta doing the whole ride as written. It was supposed to be about 30 miles and 4000 feet of climbing, but howie was proposing cutting it down to 20 miles and 3000 feet. It was to be a shuttle either way, just depended on the end point. After some negotiation we settled on the shorter route with the potential for some bonus mileage at the end. Ho was not feeling up to riding today so he stayed back and did the housecleaning. That left five us, the perfect number for the Beast as a shuttle vehicle. Off to Strawberry Point to drop off the bikes and Bernie and Rick, I navigated, howie drove the beast and Scott drove the van to the end point, Teah campground at Navajo Lake. We left the beast and drove back to Strawberry Point and started the ride. The first mile or so was a nice downhill switchbacky single track from the elevation gained on driving up the mountain. We then started climbing up a nicely graded single track, some loose rocks but not bad. That joined up with a jeep road that we were supposed to take up about 0.3 miles but took up about 0.5 then had to back track a bit, BONUS mileage and climbing. That went down to a drainage then more climbing. We finally got up to the rim after circumnavigating around some private ground and a bunch of climbing. It was a rather impressive sight, some nice redrock cliffs and the whole virgin river valley including Zion in front of us. It started sprinkling on us and we could see some serious weather to our right but we seemed to be on the edge of this mountain induced storm cloud. The issue was the trail would turn to “gumbo” if it got too wet and it had seen some rain the day before. We rode along the rim with peeks of vistas and heard thunder off to the right but no serious rain. We picked up the pace a bit and didn’t really stop for photo opps. Scott got a few pictures but his stupid Olympus camera has an XD card and won’t take my mini USB cable so we don’t have any pictures from today. We had a nice downhill to a potential hike out to some waterfall type vista but again the weather looked scary so we continued on. We had made it as high as about 9400 feet then dropped down to closer to 9000 before the painful climb up to about 9500 then a bit of a drop then back up to about 9700 around Navajo Point before the last decent to Navajo Lake. Overall it was about 20 miles with about 3000 feet of climbing all on single track and much of it on relatively loose track, some at upto a 10% grade. The nice part was all the downhill was really sweet, nothing too steep and no super crazy switch backs. We really got lucky with the weather, we could tell it had rained on the last few miles of track we did earlier in the afternoon, a few “muddy” spots but not bad, just tacky and by the time we returned to the start, it had rained there after we had gone through. All in all not a top 10 ride, howie and I are so spoiled but another ride that did not suck. Back at camp Ho had cleaned up the RV, did laundry, and had the baked potatoes ready for the rest of the steak meal we were gonna cook.