Moab - Day 4 (part 1)

Before bed last night, we called a half dozen shuttle companies looking for a shuttle for Porcupine Rim for today. It took a while, but we finally arranged pick up for Porcupine Rim at 10:00am today.

We had a leisurely morning and arrived early to hang out waiting for the shuttle to show up. We waited, and waited, and waited. While waiting, we found a plaque that told about two bikers that were killed while biking Porcupine Rim. Ok, so it took us a long time to find a shuttle company, the shuttle never arrived, and now we have the negative juju from reading this plaque. This is when we bag Porcupine Rim and decide to salvage the rest of the day.

[We rode a small trail at lunch time, which I can't recall now. I'll edit this later when I remember.]

After that trail, it was back to Moab for some grub. We pulled out the Rider Mel book and chose Behind the Rocks trail. This it the 24 hours of Moab course. The description said it was a challenging but fun course. Plus, they ride it day and night for the race, so how hard could it be?

We hit the trail around 3:00 and follow the books instructions and the "Behind the Rocks" trail markers. The trail is a wide jeep trail that goes through the desert. The jeep road is part bare rock, hard packed soil, and 3 inches deep sand, which made it nearly impossible to bike through. We passed grass fields, and rock formations. We bike for a while and compare the trail markers with the book's instructions. After the first hour, we determine that the book's instructions were too vague to follow, so we rely on the trail markers - assuming that as long as we're on the trail, we'll be fine.

As we continue on, the most notable land feature was Picture Frame Arch. As we passed by that arch, we noticed a shallow cave on the back side. We also noticed that the trail markers are continuing to direct us farther and farther away from the trailhead. Shouldn't the trail turn back toward the parking area soon??? We pull out the book gain, and determine it as useless as before. Let's stay on trail - that's the safe thing to do.

We kept going for another hour or so and stopped again. This time we were on a ledge with a 100 ft. drop below us. We could make out the trail as it winds down the ledge and continues on as far out in the distance as we can see. We certainly can't keep going on. We have about an hour of daylight left and we're a good 3 hours into the trail.

We clearly can't make it out before sunset, so we decide to head for the shallow cave near Picture Frame Arch. As we head back there, we periodically stop and check for a cell phone signal. Never getting a signal, we finally make it to the cave with about 30 minutes of twilight left. We each break into survival mode. We gather firewood, continue to search for a cell phone signal, and try to start a fire with no matches or lighter.

After 45 minutes of MacGyver-like ingenuity, Drew gets a fire started with a video camera battery pack, and some brake cable strands (no lie - it was very impressive to watch). Around that same time, Andrew gets through to 911 and is eventually connected to the Sherriff who says he'll come get us in about an hour.

Sure enough, and hour later, we see headlights bouncing down a dirt road getting closer to us. The Sherriff decides to take two of us back to our rental truck and we can drive in to get the rest of the crew and all our bikes.