Telluride To Moab
Hut One, Hut Two, Hut Three
By Brooks Stevenson - Originally published in Utah Outdoors
magazine
Below and behind me, my five companions strained against the 20 percent grade of the remote desert track in John Brown Canyon, just west of Gateway, Colorado. To the Golden eagle soaring high above our steep, narrow passage or the rancher passing us easily in his truck, we must have looked absolutely pitiful: Our bikes and bodies are loaded down with gear, we hunch over our handlebars like decrepit old men, swaying back and forth in the saddle as we pedal and sweat profusely — like mob bosses on the witness stand.
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Photo by John Humphries |
It’s the sixth day of a seven-day mountain bike ride from Telluride, Colorado, to Moab, Utah, and we’re presently plodding along on the toughest day of the trip — a 22-mile course that gains almost 5,000 grueling vertical feet and loses a disappointing 900. When we left Telluride, jagged peaks, with lingering snowfields death-gripped on their flanks, fractured the skyline at nearly every vantage point.
The anticipation of riding 206 miles through the splendor of the San Juan Mountains seemed to mask the reality of how difficult this ride might be — that we might actually sweat and get tired over the journey.
Now it’s real.
For the last five miles, the oil and gravel swath teased and taunted, appeared to crest, only to dart left or right in a steep ascending coil of switchbacks that lead to more quad-clenching grinding in my granny gear. As I peeked out from under the visor of my helmet, the road ahead seemed to level a bit as it approaches a merger with the sky — but I don’t trust what I see.
Finally reaching the apex of the first major ascent, 5.3 miles into the ride and 2,500 feet above where we started, I stripped off my pack and shirt and lay on a cattle guard (the most hospitable surface I could find not coated with red clay and the fine taupe-colored dust that lined the road) to wait for the others. I caught my breath and drank some cold lemonade, as the previous days’ rides replayed in my mind. Rides through thick aspen and pine forests, verdant fields of wildflowers, sweeping cattle ranches and wild wind-swept ridges.
Logistically, the San Juan Hut System is fairly simple: You bring yourself, bike, clothes and repair items,and the hut is stocked with the rest (food, water, fuel, sleeping bags, mattresses and toilets). The route is almost entirely doubletrack forest roads, with optional singletrack soon to be available on 70 percent of the 206 miles, and only a few miles of pavement.
The route follows the San Juan Mountains through Colorado for most of the trip, before it drags you into the La Sal Mountains and dumps you spandex-over-Styrofoam into the red rock canyon country of Moab.
As I lay in bed the first night, listening to the mice begin their forage in our hut, one phrase from the Mountain Bikers Bible, provided by owner and operator of San Juan Huts, Joe Ryan, stuck in my head, “The route is remote … riders must possess survival skills.” Survive what? Bears? Dehydration? Altitude? Weather? Hut mates? Before I could decide what to worry about, sleep took over and soon it was morning.
The route from Telluride to Moab is an incredible collection of vistas strung back-to-back, forming a sort of personal week-long nature film. But beauty wasn’t the only attraction of the trip. Most of our group of six were attracted by the self-guided system, lightweight travel, remote placement of the route, and the chance to pedal at a moderate pace while absorbing the side shows going on around us.
And that’s a welcome reprieve from the gear-schlepping life in the backcountry I’ve become accustomed to over the past 10 years.
After a spectacular climb through a green-walled maze, we reached Windy Point, a stunning view of the Colorado Plateau, the Las Sal Mountains in the distance and the remote Henry Mountains where the skyline began to fade.
Below us the Dolores and San Miguel rivers wove a series of carving and twisting canyons we’d traveled through days before to get to Telluride. Above the river valley, desert mesas leveled and stretched into the distance where we caught our first glimpse of the La Sals and the hazy outline of the far-distant Henry Mountains, the last range to be surveyed in the continental United States.
That night it started to rain. The next morning the reality of living on a plateau at 9,000 feet hit us like the blanket of snow that fell.
Donning rain suits, fleece hats and far too many layers of high tech underwear, we set out for Gateway, the small trailer park that posed as a town where our next hut sat in a grove of cottonwoods adjacent to the Dolores River. Most of our group had chosen an alternate route, to eliminate most of the day’s climbing and dirt roads. The detour added eight miles to our would-be 32 miles and involved 30 miles of road riding. But, it also kept us out of the high country where lightning was an ever-present threat and the roads might become impassable.
Having survived snow, wind, and most of the hardest climb, I peeled myself off the cattle guard, struggled into my pack and onto my bike and climbed higher into the La Sals. We finished the day lounging in a small grassy meadow in front of the La Sal Hut, reminiscing over the whirlwind of events from the previous six days. My pal Chris managed to not throw his bike off a cliff in exercise-induced frustration and we’d stayed problem free as far as mechanical issues went (not a single flat tire in our entire group the whole trip, as it turned out).
Bouncing down Sand Flats Road in Moab on the last day, it was difficult to separate one day from another. I’d seen an old John Wayne movie setting, raced elk as they paced us on a section of remote doubletrack, talked with a working cowboy while his son broke a horse and watched a snowstorm in June.
We’d also passed an old outlaw hideout where we stopped to ponder the prospects of surviving this rugged wilderness without canned Spam, ravioli and chicken noodle soup. We were spoiled.
I found myself wishing I was back on that big climb, with my posterior throbbing from the pressure, sweat stinging my eyes, the sun scorching my neck, earning my passage with hard work and a little help from the huts.
Brooks Stevenson is a prolific contributor to the Guide. An enthusiastic outdoorsman, Brooks knows what he writes about, since he does what he writes about.