Bob Palin's Blog

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...

Last weekend the forecast for Torrey said highs in the low 90s, about as hot as it gets normally, so I decided to head north in search of cooler weather. I've been eying the Uinta Mountains for a couple of years now so that's where I headed, not wishing to rough it I decided on the KOA in Manila, about a mile from the Wyoming line and, importantly, with WiFi :grin: The red square is where I planned on riding, Torrey is just below center of the map where the red T is, about 280 miles from Manila Not exactly wilderness camp... Day 1 This map has the rides from Friday (red), Sunday (yellow) and Monday (blue) on it, it is about 15 miles across the width of the map. The mountains are the Uintas and it is the Ashley National Forest, Vernal is just south of the map with Flaming Gorge just to the east, Manila to the north. The ride started at the bottom right corner, there is a little hiker there but he's a bit hard to see. My plan was to follow the Outlaw Trail which was set up a...