Moab 2010

I’m back. Wow, what a great trip. Weather was great and had to opportunity to ride some of the best bikes made. The folks at Western Spirit know how to put on a quality event, well-organized, every attention to detail covered. We flew into Salt Lake City Wednesday night and drove to Provo and spent the night. Got up early Thursday morning, grabbed some quick breakfast and hit the road to Moab. Provo is about a 3 hour drive and when we arrived we had to drive past the event location to get to our condo so we already had a lay of the land. Dropped off all our gear at the condo and headed back to the demo. Registration was smooth and we received a swag bag with a Outerbike T-shirt, water bottle and assorted gels and energy bars. After a quick look around we grabbed some bikes and hit the trail.

There were several ways to attack the demos. Ride a bunch of bikes for short rides or takes longer rides on a few bikes, we opted for the later. The first day was from noon to 5 and I demo’d the new Turner Sultan for a couple of hours and then tried the Intense Tracer 29 back to back. I had thought the Tracer would be on my short list for a new bike until after the demo, not anymore. The back to back test verified that the Sultan is the better bike. Friday and Saturday we selected a bike for the day and took the shuttle provided by Western Spirit to Porcupine Rim and Slickrock. Friday I had the Norco Shinobi 29er for Porc and then a carbon Santa Cruz Nomad for Slickrock. Now, as an after thought, I should have switched bikes for the particular trails. The Norco was okay for Porcupine but the Nomad was not very good at Slickrock and I think had they been switched they both would have rocked.

Sunday we decided to do a ride called “The Whole Enchilada”, an epic ride that’s a never forget as long as you live ride. Since Outerbike was winding up the final day and would be shutting down early we rented bikes and shuttled up to the La Sal mountains to start the ride. The ride took us 33.13 miles back to town and took just over 4 hours of riding and a total time of 7 hours. Three hours seems like a lot of time not riding, but we stopped a lot to take photos and I had 3 flats along with the other 2 flats in our group, all those things add up. It was truly an amazing ride.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s several million that cover my trip.