Moab, UT

holy shit! that's great! you probably picked a good time of year to arrive. i've only been to moab a couple times, as a stop on the way to the deserts and slot canyons in southeast UT. both were incredible experiences and i was so jealous of everyone who lived around there. someday i hope to make it out west.

stay safe and gl

thanks my dudes.

Moab, UT more like Moa bUT

LOL

Mill Creek flows out of the La Sals (a volcanic island of peaks about 12000 ft high) and runs through town. For about four blocks just west of Main Street it's just the creek, a Cottonwood grove and a dirt road.

https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/31421594_10156318030637720_8515138990462634796_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=50d777f2277ae203533a994efd3c9761&oe=5B58C514
https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/31404270_10156318030632720_16608587695829290_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=ccf8912833125488d5895c03366b8be4&oe=5B6489FA
https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/31444997_10156318030672720_9162040987704711188_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=be17a5ae7b03e1992b009edf8a0a24eb&oe=5B8F8B66

this weekend main street was overrun by car show people (definitely not my bag). weird to see the main drag backed up for miles this morning with those folks leaving while just a few blocks west it's the usual sleepy small town barely-there traffic.

i can't get over how you can just walk out your front door and breathe extremely clean, delicious air. fills me with glee.

I love how the La Sals got their name.
Ha I even love when there's nearby wildfires...everything smells like a campfire. Unless the smell lasts for days, then it gets to be too much.

wikipedia has a great photo of the la sals from gemini bridges road. i love running in that area on the magnificent 7 trails.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/LaSalMountains.jpg

the cottonwoods are going wild right now and the air is very sweet-smelling.

never been more grateful for thai food becoming popular in middle america 15 years ago, because there are two (!) thai restaurants here and one is actually pretty good.

👍. Pretty soon itll get HOT. Where are u from?

Dry heat tho, outta the sun its no prob really.

salt lake so just a few degrees hotter really

ahhh, you are practically a local- Wasatch, uintah, la Sal no big dif. 😬 jk

I've eaten at the one Thai place that's in an old house a couple times. It was good! Though my friend did have a big ol hair in his curry.

Got sick after eating at El Ch@rro Loco. It hit me just after starting overnight hike in Canyonlands. Not fun!

hm yeah, i noticed that place for the first time today. for late nite i like a giliberto's burrito. so much utah food sucks but the mexican fast food places that are open late or 24 hrs are usually pretty decent to delicious. the moonflower co-op deli is a godsend for lunch. main street is a zoo i try to avoid as much as possible tbh. the hospital has a little grill where you can get a 3.50 hamburger that isn't bad.

today i went up mill creek to the waterfall. it was a thursday so not super crowded, 15-20 people around max. for a minute no one was around. i fucking love being in water to a ridiculous degree, i giggle like a stupid kid if i'm going swimming. anyway i spent a solid 30-40 minutes swimming around in the hole, then hiked further up to the next little slide, swam some more, came back down to the main hole, swam some more. three hours total. it was a blast.

http://actcampground.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/SwimmingHole.jpg

90 degrees today but with a breeze so being in the water for too long felt a little chilly. but i did not give a fuck, i wanted to get as much of it in as possible.

swimming in relatively clean water that isn't chlorinated is totally divine and something i think i need to do at least once a week this summer.

hey map this thread has been a total treat to check into lately, nice work. $3.50 hospital hamburgers por vida

yea i have never been to moab but i love this thread

btw do you pronouce it like mo-ab or mobe

Mo Ab

holy shit the tourist season is finally over in moab and the streets are motherfucking empty and i'm so hyped for winter -- as long as we don't get snow pack down in the valley because that makes running a bitch especially on slick rock. i really don't like venturing out for a run and seeing a full parking lot at the trail head and a bunch of screaming kids etc, which was the case through a lot of october and november, although there has never been a real crowding problem once i'm on the actual trail.

residents of moab are called moabites ftr.

i went to a hip hop dance party at a mountain bike store last saturday night. 30-40 people showed up, which is a total party here.

Have you obtained some local knowledge on "secret" trails ie unofficial social trails? Dunno if they exist there but I'm guessing so.

https://vimeo.com/49544042

if the season ended in september in the late 50s when abbey worked arches, winter musta been pretty desolate in moab.

haha a few things

i hate edward abbey. racist, misogynist and homophobic, yes, but in my opinion those qualities or blindnesses are symptoms of the deeper problem that he was a boring, shallow asshole lacking any visionary spark or unique insight and riding a misbegotten concept of 'wilderness'.

i run the trails that are on the maps. there are definitely areas a person can explore that are 'unofficial' and lots of locals do that but mostly i just want to run and not think too much about where i'm going.

'secret' stuff is more in the cedar mesa area where there are ruins that need protection and amplifying traffic via directions on the internet is going to make that a lot harder.

i'm on the gay hookup apps, grindr and scruff, and sometimes i get a tourist hiker fan asking me for trail recommendations and most of the time it's like... the map knows better than i do, just figure it out, it isn't that hard, i'm not your tour guide. i mean if they're nice and not presumptuous then i might point them in one direction or another. but i'm not really a hiker who's been everywhere, i run in the same 3-4 areas that are beautiful but not really destination hikes, i don't know what the destination hikes are. i moved down here in april and the first time i went into arches np was over thanksgiving because it's been cars backed up for a mile and the last thing i want to do when i 'get out' is wait in a line of cars.

it snowed about 4" last sunday and got really cold. i ran monday and tuesday on mostly snow-covered trails and it was ok but kind of a pain in the ass, i was breaking a lot of trail and only figured out tuesday where i should head to get the south-facing terrain. wednesday i ran on slickrock and it was mostly clear. it does make things look different, lots of blue-grey light everywhere, but mostly i don't like it, turns everything into such a rigamarole.

the goddamn furnace broke in my trailer tonight, so i ran to the tiny-ass shopko before they closed which is the only other "general goods" store here besides 2 grocery stores and a drug store, and luckily they had a small ceramic space heater.

roommates are digging into the heater now bless their hearts.

lol i'm moving out in a month. back to salt lake. for loooove.

coincidentally i've gotten tired of the smallness of the town, the rednecks, the racism, the fact that it is completely overrun by tourists from march to november. the fucking four-wheelers. i'm so repulsed by anyone who spends their wilderness vacation on a motorized vehicle.

I still wanna go to indian creek 😔

stay safe and well! slc is pretty liveable and has wasatch action.

thanks!

went back this weekend.

https://scontent-den4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/130197767_10158854575837720_1653654345574395223_n.jpg?_nc_cat=104&ccb=2&_nc_sid=8bfeb9&_nc_ohc=_BtuIIB57AAAX_ndCdv&_nc_ht=scontent-den4-1.xx&oh=83c7e3ed69d347c7b6cdc2bb00ceea7e&oe=5FF32C64

klondike bluffs is the most beautiful place in the world.

i'm not a woo woo person but it's also definitely haunted.

true. i'm placidly a bit woo woo. glad you got a refresh.

i rode about 70% of kokopelli at the end of oct, til we bailed to avoid an imminent snowstorm in la sals. we decided not to go over the top of them. the upside of the diversion was that we went down onion creek, which i'd not seen before, nor really even heard of? actually is east of castle valley, sorta wedged next to fisher mesa. it was fucking unreal and beautiful, like much of the region. we camped night two along burbling onion creek, set up under 3 or 4 massive orange cottonwoods and lots of other scrubbier stuff. we saw nobody and no vehicles from sunset til 8:30a the next day.

after we rode the rest of the canyon in the next morning, we ended up riding the road by the river over to town for the last 30mi.

after 28 years, moab is almost unrecognizable to me and increasingly sad, totally fucking insanely crowded in covid (at that time the provo zone was already just a virus garden). moab is CO's covid getaway.

we finished outside dining at doughbird, still in partial sunshine (that supergrande super deep-fried chicken breast sandwich, served on a massive slab of doughnut/fried dough instead of bread, extra picante, after 2.5 days of riding, is one of the highlights of my year). by the time we rode back to our car 1/2 a mile away, the snow slam had begun, temp dropped 20 deg, pelting sleet then flakes. the 5.5 hour trip to denver took me 13.5 hours.

oh wow, glad you made it out just fine. onion creek is unreal and remote, yeah. i've never really been up in there, just seen a little bit from the fisher towers hiking trail.

moab itself was fairly quiet last weekend. agree that it's really sad what it's turned into.

i'll never forget that scene in desert solitaire where abbey launches and abandons a tire into a canyon somewhere for like pretty bullshit reasons, can't even remember circumstances. in the 50s doing that didn't have much lasting effect, relatively. but at least since 19th cent it's been a hard living space, extraction and uh, "impaction."

when my crew finishes the vid summary of the outing, i'll post a link here, we got lot's of images and video. of the 4 of us, i was the only non photo expert.

rather doubt inserting insta is possible, but here's one view of onion creek from our trip.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHBB-AGFenf

big images at the pod page that jefe and nick made. https://www.rodeo-labs.com/rodeo-podcast-ep7-mostapelli/

What do y'all mean…what HAS happened to Moab? Overrun with tourists who treat the outdoors as an amusement park?

lots of development

yeah it's a bit plus ca changey if that's what you mean.

i remember Easter Jeep Safari Wknd april 93, it seemed pretty outta hand. there were scores of people. a line of 15 jeeps in town with some drunks in them. one was TOPLESS!!!!

at the end of this october there were like, thousands. i suspect drunk, but nobody topless. also, due to construction, it took over an hour to drive out of town if you were sticking to the highway. at least 2 miles of partying people in traffic.

favorite complaint from throttletwisting friends in 92: "You bike weirdos need to understand that motorcycles built slickrock and everything you love here."

favorite complaint from throttletwisting friend in 20: "RZRs are the worst thing ever. they are ignorant drunk out of controls jerks who don't know the rules or etiquette or the trails and are wrecking everything. they need limits."

xp. also, that doughbird sandwich justifies _everything_. jk jk

I know here in Sedona they limit the amount of tours a company can do (of course it's basically meaningless, since the number is set so high that it's basically the amount a tour operator could logistically do in a day) but there's no limit on how many rentals (jeeps, RZRs etc) they can do per day for tourists to go traipsing around on their own. And of course the guided tours go on the same few routes so you can avoid them, but unguided rental ppl can go wherever the law allows.
Same deal in Moab I assume?

the doughbird people are nice, they also started "the garage" on main. their food is good but $6 coffee? ymmv.

i tell you what, december-february is now the time to go if you want to avoid crowds, but it's still the off-season for a reason - if there's even a little bit of snow on that rock and clay you're fucked. we're tentatively going over xmas but watching the weather.

i don't know how the tour companies operate and don't care, fuck em all imo. i will only go where i know i won't hear a ton of utvs. we had a beautiful hike up bartlett wash. only intermittently quiet though, the other noise pollution that's increased is constant air traffic.

From helicopter tours?

small planes + commercial flights in and out of canyonlands airport. and higher passover flights that you don't normally notice. i crave the kind of quiet where you can hear your nervous system humming.

it is a sad fact I have learned to deal with, that attractive places attract people, so that even the more remote ones eventually get overrun. the only solution I have found is to learn to appreciate the profound beauty of the somewhat less attractive places, where I can still find solitude.

The Innernet, esp Instagram, has accelerated it. Horseshoe Bend had relatively few people when I went there in 2013 and 2015. Now I wouldn't ever go there unless I happened to be on the way somewhere else and bad weather kept away the hordes.

booked my semi-annual trip for feb. 20. had to move it two weekends back from my original plans because hotel prices are insane this year.

i was in green river last may when you could only do one-night stays for "essential travel," and it was glorious. there was NO ONE. just incredible. probably never going to happen again :(. barring the end of the world. haha

Hunter if you see this how was your april trip?

fuckin rad, san rafael is cool space. objective achieved. my little escapade got wonderfully friended/transformed into a 6 person rodeo posse.

and weirdly, we were pretty far in the back of beyond near the end of day one and we went through an uncommon and random campsite near muddy creek (which campsite looked v grand, with sand bocce going and kiddos and dogs around). days later after the trip, i got pinged by a close pal from grand junction who asked me "how was your outing over the wknd, i saw you and your crew buzz by our camp/bocce setup? i couldn't yell to you in time." damn, you think you got away from everything, but nope. wish i'd seen him and stopped tho.

still, that buddy of mine knows that space well, and he noted that the increase in traffic at san rafael generally is p significant, lots of bikepacking and hiking. at our trailhead post-ride we met two separate sprinter van couples from outide of usa (uk and germany). both were bikepacking extensively in the rockies and further west.

the pack route we took was the standard one you can find in bikepacking.com, nothing novel. scenic.

(advisory-- if you find muddy crk tranquil and filterable, filter and store it immediately. creek can mysteriously become turbid and unfilterable while youre not looking, and it can wreck your breakfast and your hydration).

oh and also since my jan post i've read _west of the 100th meridian_, by stegner. it's basically about the great basin, j. wesley powell, and the region's exploration by euroculture and the mess and destruction we cannot stop making in and around it. generally recommended if that's your kind of thing. cool to consider in relation to like, _cadillac desert_. or abbey.

the swell is no longer a secret i guess. it's been a few years since i've been anywhere deeper than the reef, not a soul to be seen at the time but it's probably a little different now. i have a friend who is a super outdoor adventure guy, also very kind and very gay, who rafted the muddy a few years ago, i think he said they saw a handful of people the whole trip.

i've been having a long running conversation with my partner about why we love the utah desert. it's generally the quiet, the visible time, and the clean air, tho i have fun on my short little trail runs (shuffles really). my partner takes photos of small plants, leaves, sand eddies, that kind of thing. occasionally we hit the mtn bike trails because they're good running. my partner drifts off trail because he doesn't like the bikers. i have to concur generally, i've certainly met good souls who are bikers but more often than not whenever they pass me there's a lot of nervous energy on display... people are fuckin loud out there for no good reason.. also packs of men with something to prove to each other and male gear acquisition bonding rituals to engage in. it's fucking tedious. i don't want to hear anything human when i'm out there except for the sound of my breath and nervous system. anyway, rant over.

it was quiet this weekend. moab was pretty dead. the winter dark at night and the quiet have such a depth to them.

ayup, i hope u can keep finding peace.

i def understand the disruption u feel, i fear we may be rowdy enough to annoy. fwiw none of my set are gravity types who yip or yowl “spontaneously.”

i rode the lake city alpine 50 this year in CO, and i’ll say this— several circles of hell are navigated almost entirely by RZRs, and they’re now overspilling into the rockies/grt basin in astonishing abundance.

i try to stop and remember that slickrock was “founded” by throttle twisters and then just think about serenity and shit.

ha here was day one of the swell, good sense of the space
https://www.relive.cc/view/vPOpZ1NyrRq

mlk weekend scene report

a few out-of-towners for the holiday weekend but mostly empty. snow level at about 5000 feet, snow free in the valley and blessedly snow free at klondike bluffs when we stopped in on saturday. the entire desert south of price was blanketed in snow, almost all the way to green river. i've never seen that before. looks like tons of snow in the san rafael swell. it's going to be an explosive spring. boyfriend noticed a lovely little plant with large flower stalk at klondike, ided it as winged buckwheat.

we've been down 3x per year over the past 3 years. still dream about owning a piece of land with a cottage or trailer on it in the area. have this idea that it should be in thompson springs.

Dream it do it.

And yeah the Lower Green and Jordan and Weber basins are all 200%+ and are just getting hammered over and over. My friend in the Wasatch is already wore out by snow.

down for another mlk weekend! this trip was so so good. i went with an incredibly beautiful boy who i love. we hiked horseshoe canyon to the great gallery. the art was overwhelmingly sublime. that canyon is glorious. no one else the entire time.

nice and so appealing. front range is tucked under that below 0°F zone and i’m like dreaming of even 40° desert skies.

a grand cottonwood and me

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kjWnV6xpyOIEtGS83wsmCZrQ0tsY0lNd/view?usp=drive_link

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