Northern Utah had been super-smoky with the blown-in smoke from the California and Oregon wildfires but southern Utah had kept fairly clear skies. Until about Thursday, when the winds changed. With our typical good timing, we headed down Thursday night and as we drove into town, we couldn't even see the LaSal mountains for all the haze. In addition, temperatures were going to ratchet up several notches for the weekend and with the smoke-choked skies, wouldn't cool off very much overnight.
Because we knew it was going to get hot, we planned to get up and out early so as to get our MTBing done before the heat kicked into high gear. We also didn't want to drive very far so we could get back in time to give the dog a short walk before the pavement heated up too much. That meant MOAB Brand Trails for both our Friday and Saturday rides and each time we were on the trail well before 8 a.m. (So, only sort of early, I guess.)
Friday we did some of our old school route: out through the cow pasture to Rusty Spur, to Bar M around to the parking lot cut-off, out across Copper Ridge Road - which was in pretty rough shape after all the monsoonal rain Moab has been getting - to the upper portion of Lazy-EZ. In addition to the washouts on Copper Ridge Road, we noticed that because of the recent downpours there was a lot of sand in places that don't usually have sand - disconcerting at best and alarming in a couple of spots. No crashes though and we were safely back home well before it hit 104 F for the day's high.
Some of the haze dissipated overnight bringing clearer skies Saturday morning (before the smoke blew back in that afternoon), which was nice. We were back at the trailhead by 7:30 a.m. along with at least five different tour groups: in Park City, the MTB tour time magic hour is 10:30 a.m. but that's way too late in the day in Moab this time of year. We saw one huge school group of preteen boys from Idaho several times along our ride but largely had the trails to ourselves.
This time we did the front half of Lazy-EZ to Rusty Spur to Bar M, then continued out along Bar B to the Arches National Park boundary. Nobody goes up there and the final approach is up a long, level slickrock slab - my favorite kind of climbing. After going back the way we came on Bar B, we finished out Bar M, with H going the long way around and with me taking the shorter but much sandier double-track below North 40. It took me a fair bit longer than usual because I had to deal with some small washouts and a lot of sand. Again, we wrapped things up and were home to hang out in the A/C with Milton before the day's high of 103 F. That's just hot.
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