My Secret Getaways

This is Day 2 of a 3-day “road trip” our bicycle club took to Moab Utah. This day was “just a little bit” more difficult than Day 1. We went fewer miles, but…

Cyclists left the B&B, crossed the Colorado River bridge into a hellacious head wind, with dirt and grit hitting your face like tiny bullets.

Arriving at Arches park a few miles west on the highway, you were more sheltered from the wind, but the climb … OMG.

Leaving the highway (left-center above) you had to peddle skyward into the park. Growing old is NOT for WIMPS.

After a couple of miles, things began to level out a little. Here you got the payoff for the climb. I was not prepared for the magnificence of the scenery.

This is one of those things that you just cannot represent with a mere photograph. The size of these monoliths is staggering and the expanse of this particular view just took our breath away.

We continued a few more miles, until we came to a place where the grade started steeply downward … VERY steeply downward for as far as the eye could see. Realizing we would have to pull ourselves out of this if we went down it, we devised a plan. My wife and I would go back to get the car and our friends would continue on down the seemingly endless, steep hill.

I don’t remember quite how long it took us to climb up to this turn-around point, but it was at least a couple of hours. It took my wife and I only 27 minutes (I timed it) to get back. We had to hang on to the breaks to keep from becoming airborne.

We loaded our bikes onto the car and headed back up to meet our friends at a designated rendezvous point, thus saving them the climb back out of the deep valley into which they had decended after our retreat.

We met at the trailhead for “Delicate Arch,” the icon arch that appears in all the Utah travel books. The arch doesn’t look all that big above, does it?

Wrong! Here’s a little better perspective, with my friend at the base of the arch.

Rock — Mountains — Snow … from our vantage point at Delicate Arch

See Day 1 of our Trip: Road Biking around Moab, Utah