Bob Palin's Blog

After spending 5 days trying to hide from the heat in the even taller mountains of Colorado I get home to find it is still going to be 90+ all week. Last June we had 4 days over 90, so far there have been 11 this year. It's so hot that Rabbit has dug himself a hole to lay in and try to cool down...

Day 4 - the ride on the way home This is the blue ride on the map I wasn't quite satisfied with my riding because there was still some of the Outlaw Trail to investigate, it was an "easy" part mostly and looked like it really just followed the paved road to make a complete loop, still it needed to be done... I got an early start - no, really! - and was packed and at the trailhead by 11am. I was right about the first section of the trail, it started out very civilised and just followed some power lines parallel to the road, I soon became tired of that and found a trail that led off into the trees - the deep trees but a pleasant ride happily riding along I thought I was way out in the country until I found this there was nobody there and throughout the whole area there were numerous trailers that looked as if they had been left in the trees for the whole summer, I assume people take them out in the winter, they would be completely buried in snow if not but maybe that wouldn...

I don't usually ride dirt two days in a row and this was to be my third, it ended up being a somewhat shorter day than the others but had its share of challenges. I drove back over the mountain to the Vernal side and found a place to unload the truck off Rt 20 - this is a paved road wider and smoother than most of those in my county. My first destination was a high point called Dyer Mountain, a fairly rough trail led up to a mine then branched into many side trails, eventually I followed the one that led to the top which turned out to have a horrendously steep and loose rise over the last 50 yards or so. I didn't even attempt it but wandered around to see the view and discovered that I wasn't the only one who didn't fancy the hill. One of the maze of trails ran across some quite rocky ground round the front of the hill to the top. Looking west from Dyer Mountain, the track is the light area in the foreground - a bit rocky! Looking south from Dyer Mountain (10,248ft) Eas...

Day 2 This map has the two parts of the Saturday ride on it, first I did the yellow road out and back then the red loop counter clockwise. This ride was to the north of the other 3 days, just south of Manila as you can see from the map. Bigger version of map I started out by taking the Sheep Creek Geological Trail in the truck with the CRF in the back of course. The idea of the trail is to display all the various layers and formations as you go up the very steep sided canyon, I took pictures of each sign with the appropriate formation but it wasn't very interesting looking at it again. Highway 191 which heads north and uphill from Vernal also has signs for each layer with little snippets of information about the layer, things like "coal found here", "dinosaurs roamed", "fossilized giant squid found", "Benicia_RT went here", and so on. The canyon is very pretty, the loop is mostly paved with very short stretches of gravel and lots of big pot h...