Moab... because why not? Day One

I haven't driven across the country since the weekend after 9/11... and we just happened to be going to Moab then as well.  I swore I'd never do it again, but I didn't expect to ever have so much free time on my hands.

Some things have changed since then...

Some, not so much.

My first turn at sleeping, I injured myself in the the too-tall-for-me passenger seat.  Too much weight on my right leg for a couple hours tryna to not slide down completely to the floorboard, and my calf was pissed at me.  I don't handle long road trips very well, mostly because I'm dumb.

On the drive out, it dawned on me that the bike I had won back in March was from a company in Colorado.  A quick google search and... hey, it's in Denver, right off the highway.  I sent them an email letting them know I'd be passing through on Saturday and also on the return trip on Thursday.  Fingers crossed, but I doubt my timing should be so lucky.

Get to the campground in Moab late Saturday night, meet up with Chad and Darren, sleep hard.

Wake up to this sight:

I'll be damned.  Curtis Inglis.  I ain't seen him since 2008?  I think... back when he told everyone at SSWC '08 to throw me into the poison oak.  Good times.

He was befuddled as to why I was putting a fork on my bike in the parking lot.

I told him the long story about how this 140mm Fox fork ended up in my hands just in the nick of time to go to Moab.  I'm 99% sure he regretted asking about one third of the way through the story.

I didn't just come out to the desert to hang out with "industry" celebrities tho.  We loaded up the two vans and made our way out of town to shuttle the Mag 7 route.

A billion years ago, I rode Gemini to Gold Bar and also Poison Spider Mesa to Portal.  I thought I knew what I was in for with mag 7.  I was wrong.

Such a slog... mebbe made worse by the long drive and also Bill Nye deciding to not eat almost the whole way here.

I took photos at this same spot almost twenty years ago.  I'm not one for change.

Darren had warned us that the ride would be mega chill until it wasn't.  The haul up to Portal was soul crushing.

Those are crushed souls mebbe.

I don't remember where this happened, but it totally did.

Sigh.  Eventually we push and shove our way over to Portal, the trail where people have fallen to their deaths.  I didn't like it the first time.  I didn't like it this go around either.  My irrational fear of heights hasn't gotten any better with age.

Dammit.  My right cleat was loose (unbeknownst to me), and during one of the rare moments while I was actually riding down Portal, I came down in a heap.  Adding insult to literal injury, I tore my Dirt rag sock.  The suffer is real.

At the bottom, Darren proclaimed that he was going to ride back into town instead of sitting in the dirt drinking beer waiting for the vans to return to scoop our carcasses.  Just as my last trip went, I wasn't going to let someone ride more than me whilst in Moab.  So nice to finish a long ride with more riding.

Some variety of this was dinner every night for me, a random sack of Indian food mixed with an equally random sack of rice.  Camping should not be hard.

Speaking of hard...

It felt like this was a daily occurrence.  Pretty sure this was Bill Nye fixing Chad's broken spoke and also trying to diagnose why his Hope hub didn't wanna freewheel anymore.  We did some things that didn't seem to make sense from a mechanical standpoint, but it worked, so fuck it.  Some people like Hope hubs.  I don't get it.

I do like the desert tho.