Mr. Adam's Wild Ride

I actually wrote the rest of this post over a week ago, but I've been very busy at work and have not had time to edit the photos, or even ride. At this point I'm giving up and that and just posting. Sorry...

Yesterday was the day for the 3rd annual Grizzly Adam Epic, aka the Wasatch Classic.

The route, layed out by Adam Lisonbee, is a tour of the Wasatch intended to link several of the best trails and views of the greatest scenery between Park City and Salt Lake City.

Like the real Grizzly Adams, EpicAdam has chosen a wild animal for his best friend, and no one successfully tamed this beast in 2007 or 2008. Personally, I became aware of the route last year when Reed started, but did not finish after several wrong turns and a long, tiring day.

So this year Reed was determined to finish, and he showed up 'loaded for bear', as they say.

Reed started committed, I did not. About last week Reed mentioned the epic was this week and we decided then to do it, but I've had a couple long, tiring weeks at work and by Wednesday I didn't think I'd be up to a huge ride. So I told Reed I wouldn't go, and figured if I felt like it I'd just show up. I have a history of doing these things after telling myself I won't, and sure enough Friday night at midnight I was scanning the GPS files Adam had posted and decided to get up at 4:30 and see how I felt: Thanks to Adam and his digital liahona files!

So at 6 AM I was in Midway and ready to go, enjoying the beautiful dawn light and a patchy mist that I somehow failed to capture with a camera.

The rain of the past day or two left things noticably damp as we climbed over to and then out of Cascade Springs, but it was nice because it kept the dust down.

As we climbed away from Cascade Springs, we passed a large group (probably more than 200 people) of 'trekkers' (not trekkies, though I guess they might be, but most of them were pretty young for that). For those who aren't familiar with this tradition, the LDS church sometimes takes youth groups to remote places where they participate in authenic reenactments of the pioneer treks of the Mormon pioneers, complete with handcarts, bonnets, hats, and goretex parkas. They experience some of the trials, tribulations, and rewards of walking from Iowa City to Salt Lake City. The original Mormons were walking to Zion to settle the west. The modern ones aren't really walking anywhere to do anything particular, but as I mentioned in a previous post, daily life is really more about process than destination. This tradition started after I had outgrown youth groups, but I guess anyone on a 14 hour bike ride that just goes in a big circle will find it easy to understand why someone would find camping and hiking with a focused spiritual purpose to be an inspirational experience.

Once past the soon to be hajji we proceeded up to the Ant Knolls trail. To this point the trails were moist, tacky and not muddy, but as we followed the ridge across things started getting muddy. The descent to Tibble Fork Reservoir would normally be a highlight downhill for the route, but this time it was a mud-bog. By the time we reached the reservoir the bikes were not working very well, so we stopped and washed them off at the lake.

The bike wash seemed like a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. As we climbed the road towards Catherine's the chains dried out and chain-suck became a real problem (should have brought lube!). For a few miles of the climb I was mostly walking because every couple strokes the chain would jam. It looked like I was going to have to bail out and go home, but we were close to where we would have to walk anyway, so I just kept walking. I really did want to reach Catherine's. Eventually, I sprayed my chain off with my water bottle, and the chainsuck mostly went away, but we were quickly into the snow at that point and the riding was done for a while.

To gain the pass at Catherines, we pushed the bikes up steep, wet snow for a long time. At least an hour, probably more like two. In one of life's small inconsistancies, The sticky wet snow would jam the rear wheel, which would skid along as we pushed, but the snow was slippery underfoot. The bikes weighed an extra 10 lbs. and the arms and back were burning as we pushed.

The upside to all this was the time we had to appreciate the Wasatch. With mountains so close to home, it is easy to forget the Wasatch are real, amazing mountains.

From the top of the pass we were still in snow, but descending through snow was pretty easy and other than a little route-wandering, that went fine. Soon we were riding again, quickly reaching the Brighton store at about hour 9.

The Brighton store didn't have any Triflow, 3 in 1, or even WD40, so we settled for a quart of Pennzoil 10W30 to desuckify the chains. Wow, it was like a new bike after that. It took about 20 minutes to get the bikes lubed, food purchased, and calls to home to let everyone know we were doing fine, and then were were off for puke hill. After cooling off at the store, puke hill took some warming into, but the single-track from there all the way around back to the bottom of the Thayne's climb in Park City Resort was 20 miles of wonder. The trails were perfect and I felt great.

Reed was getting pretty tired by this time, but a quick break for gummy worms half way up Thaynes brought the generator back on line and soon we had motored to the top, down to the road, and up to the top of Guardsman's pass, with nothing but a long downhill to go.

Usually riding down a dirt road would not sound like much fun, but Guardsmans was a blast. 4000 feet of high-speed vertical back to the car. Adam really finished the route off right.