Moab, UT

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

because hotel prices are insane this year.

Assuming this isn't due to demand, but are hotels jacking up prices that much to make up for lost income?

pent up demand and perceived lower risk period ahead and yeah loss recapture? dunno. i've not perceived more travel plans outta my circle of likely culprits.

Yeah, the thought of travel hasn't even crossed my mind in the least, so some genuine curiosity about hotel prices.

no idea

https://i.ibb.co/dD4q07M/Screen-Shot-2021-01-25-at-15-33-07.png

i don't know if this is related at all but the pandemic has really accelerated income equality in other ways in these small western towns

https://www.hcn.org/articles/covid19-utah-housing-advocates-take-on-a-cost-crisis-made-worse-by-covid-19

inequality

as is often the case, pplains is completely opaque

More like Mopaque, amirite.

https://i.ibb.co/DbbmZ0B/Screen-Shot-2021-01-25-at-15-44-35.png

those are pictures of moab, interesting

It's an interesting place.

I keep getting ridiculously cheap hotel rates in Phoenix area fwiw

uhh so i was getting confused by per night vs total stay and they are indeed cheap.

we're on the edge of spring which means i've got desert dreams again, and we're going down there this weekend. it will probably be pretty busy even though "the season" is just starting. it's a singularly beautiful place and the access is well-developed, but the crowds are becoming more and more of a problem for me, personally. it's become more clearly a requirement for me to find some semblance of solitude on trips to the colorado plateau desert - the space and quiet is very important for me on a personal, spiritual level. i know it sounds corny but *shrugs*.

so i've decided to shift the locus of my future desert trips to either escalante / boulder or green river for a few reasons. the most important is that these two areas are both reasonably close to the kind of rock running i like to do. the exposed slickrock has to not be *too steep* and there are drainages outside of both of these places with the kind of wide-open slickrock bowls i love to prance through (google maps satellite view is such a boon for scouting out these areas). also, these areas draw far fewer tourists. i'd say most people out in the san rafael desert south of green river or in the less declined slickrock drainages around the escalante are more hardcore / committed desert rats looking for the same quiet and solitude i am. also, both of these towns have some basic motels, and while prices are higher than they used to be, they each have at least one or two cheaper options. i'd eventually like to be able to camp in a way that suits my requirements for comfort and the fact that i am lazy but until i am driven to do so by increasing hotel prices i will go for the cheap rooms.

the vanlife meme of the past 5-10 has made a shitton of people blee they can do that from what i can tell. i think i'm better suited for it than most and i still say that's way too big and costly a step for not a lot of satisfaction. i do think i could dig a decent minimalist teardrop thing though.

Escalante area is amazing. I am far from experienced in exploring the deserts of the west but a life highlight was a 4 night backpacking trip down Coyote Gulch in Escalante Nat Monument, about 15 years ago. I think it is one of the most popular routes in that area and we didn't see more than a couple dozen other people over that full time period. Not even sure what the rock running you're describing looks like but there were many wide open bowls and lots of scampering opportunities. Just breathtaking scenery. I am in New England now for the past 8 years and the foreseeable future but dream of getting back out there for a trip.

Last May I went through Escalante, to some of the narrows south down Hole in the Rock Rd, then back up rt 12 through Boulder to Torrey, then rt 24 to Capitol Reef. Def TONS of cool natural areas to explore, many relatively unvisited. I car-camped just off the highway outside of Escalante one night and outside of Boulder another. Cool to have some alpine type environment (near Boulder) so close to all the more typical Utah rock desert scenery. Capitol Reef is pretty unpopular as far as a national park goes and it is AMAZING if you're a fan of slickrock deaert, I'm sure you can find some solitude there on certain routes.

Not even sure what the rock running you're describing looks like

literally just doing a slow jog on the rock avoiding the sand as much as i can, picking lines, up and down, trying not to trip, pretty casual. i'm not a serious trail runner or anything, i got a few miles and i'm good. spencer flats road outside of escalante has some good stuff. (check out the cosmic ashtray on google maps - would love to run in that area). the other areas that are good for this are on the cliffs above the green river, south of the town of green river. bull bottom, june's bottom (there's a charmingly homegrown and exhaustive website called utahmountainbiking dot com with detailed information about these areas, because mountain bikers also like to free-ride on sandstone, but apparently some of this is now blm wilderness [june's bottom] so bikes aren't allowed).

fwiw i want to go running here (42 miles south of green river)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eu4EGWUVIAA7atq?format=jpg&name=900x900

and here (20 miles se of escalante)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eu4E69yVIAceIfD?format=jpg&name=medium

The blue pin is the mars lander “cosmic ashtray,” after its recent touchdown. “It’s a godawful huge affair,” observed one viewer.

i was not aware of the cosmic ashtray until doing these google maps scroll-and-zooms. google maps has pretty profoundly changed humanity's relationship with their world and wilderness in a short amount of time imo. anyway, here's the cosmic ashtray:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-giant-cosmic-navel-formed-utah-180955188/

the la sals are burning :(