The weekend of 27 Feb 09, Tracy and I finally headed down to Moab to do some mountain

biking.  We were a little ashamed that we had lived in Utah for over 3 years and had never

been mountain biking on the world famous slickrock around Moab.

On Saturday we went out to Bartlett Wash (Google Map) just north of Moab.  The ride was

completely on slickrock, we had it completely to ourselves, and it wasn't technical at all.  Of

course, that didn't stop us from falling a couple of times...but I only went over the handlebars

once, so I figure that was a good thing.  We really enjoyed biking up there, but we both kind of

thought we would have more enjoyed hiking the slickrock.  My thought was that a bike is best

for getting to places that you can't get to on foot, and a slickrock playground is too small to be

inaccessible by foot.  Of course, that's not the point to a slickrock playground...you're supposed

to PLAY on them.  But playing on the slickrock just didn't really appeal to us.  Maybe that was

because we were just too inexperienced, or maybe it was because we felt like it was too

dangerous or too hard.  Either way, we really felt like we'd rather hike on slickrock than bike on

it.  I guess that's a little unfortunate when you live so close to Moab, but, oh well.

After leaving Bartlett's, we went biking up Kane Springs Canyon (Google Map).  This was an

interesting bike down a rough 4x4 road, and more along the type of mountain biking we like to

do.  The road was really rocky, with lots of creek crossings, which made it a little tough, but not

too bad.  We had the road to ourselves, and had a good time.

However, we still decided we liked hiking more than mountain biking, so on Sunday we went

hiking down Straight Wash (Google Map).  We had a much more relaxing day while hiking than

we did while biking.  Straight Wash was really nice, with some climbs, a couple of frozen pools,

and just generally nice scenery,  We felt like  we should have seen a mountain lion along the

hike, but still no luck.

We had a great weekend, but we definitely decided that the slickrock biking really didn't do a lot

for us, and we would probably stick to trail biking.