109.19 mi / 7:46:57 time / 14.0 mph avg. / 39.5 mph max. / 4715 ft. climbing
Staying at Whispering Sands Motel, Hanksville

As if Dennis and Pat sharing their site hadn’t already conferred enough advantages upon us, it also meant that we would be able to see some Natural Bridges! So that’s what we did early in the morning, after getting some tips from our hosts who had done the big hike around all three bridges the day before. For us, we unloaded the bikes and rode the 9-mile loop road, walking down to two of the bridges. And I’m really glad we did, because they were way better than I expected. The bridges are sort of like arches, except they’re formed by water rather than wind. This means that they form a “bridge” over a river (or a dry wash in this case), and the area at the bottom is green, filled with birdsongs, and becomes an oasis of peace and comfort in the harsh, rugged land. So both the atmosphere and the scale was quite different than the Arches. Also, as is normal when we do our early-morning explorations, we had the whole area completely to ourselves.

We were able to ride the extra 9 miles and do a couple miles of strenuous hiking because we knew today would be an easy day. From 6700 ft. at Natural Bridges, we would roll down a 45 mile hill and cross the Colorado River once more at 4000 ft, at the point where it begins to turn into Lake Powell. We were able to confirm at the Natural Bridges visitor center that drinking water would be available at Hite “Marina”; that was a godsend, because this secion would be nearly impossible to complete without that oasis.

The downhill was fairly gradual, and we had a bit of a headwind, so Dennis and I set up a nice rhythm of exchanging the lead every two miles and letting the other person draft. This allowed us to keep a fairly constant 20 mph average, something that would have been impossible to do alone.

Halfway down, we stopped to make a brief attempt at “canyoneering”. We scrambled under the bridge at Fry Canyon and hiked a small distance until we could lower ourselves into the narrow slot cut through the sandstone. Only a few feet wide, and 20-30 ft. high at that point, the walls wind and snake just as the multi-colored layers of sandstone do, forming a beautiful and secluded hideaway. It’s too bad we didn’t have the time or equipment to explore more, but it was great to get a taste of this emerging “sport”, and we found a nice shaded sandstone bowl in which to relax and eat some Twizzlers, M&Ms, and apricots.

Then we completed the final downhill to Hite, with the red bluffs getting taller and more dramatic the closer we got to the river. Hite used to be an active marina on Lake Powell, but the lake level has dropped so low that the boat ramp now sits far, far away from the water, so all that’s really there is pay-at-the-pump gas, an intermittently-open ranger station, and an intermittently-open store. I knew this stuff from the Internet, but getting specifics is difficult. What does “intermittent” mean, and does something written in 2006 still hold up in 2009, or has the area been completely abandoned since then?

Well, not only did they have drinking water, the grocery store was open too! (10am to 4pm at the moment, fyi) And what a glorious place it was. Despite the fact that we tried to stock up on two days of food a couple days before, it seemed that our stomachs were bigger than our eyes had been. So at Hite we chowed down on some Hot Pockets, a can of peaches, cheese, and ice cream, and Gatorade, and bought a whole ton of granola and candy bars to keep us fueled over the next day until we finally reached another town. Dennis also found a small box of Q-tips that he had been looking for, and I picked up a much-needed nail-clipper. I tell you, this store was perfection! We spent over an hour and a half there, until it closed at 4pm, which also allowed us to escape some of the brutal heat down there in the river valley.

Then we had to ride a mile out back to the main road, and cross two rivers, first the Colorado, and then the Dirty Devil. That meant a lot of winding and some big hills. The fact that a road bridges this chasm is an amazing feat in itself, so we couldn’t complain too much to the builders for all the ups and downs they had to put in (I think the only other road crossings of the Colorado are over 100 miles up- and down-stream, at Moab, and in Arizona!)

My original plan for the day was to stop just on the other side of the Dirty Devil River for a short 55 mile day. But Dennis was nervous about the 80 mile day that would leave us for tomorrow, so I decided that we would go 10-15 miles further on this day, shortening our next day by that much, and find a spot to wild-camp off the side of the road. The whole day we had been on SR 95, and the mile posts were counting down the distance to the next town, Hanksville. After we crested a brutal hill that finally brought us to the gradual upward slope of the North Wash that we would follow out of the valley, I saw the 40 mile marker and jokingly said “heck, let’s just blow out these 40 miles today!”

When we stopped at the Hog Springs rest area (only a vault toilet, a picnic shelter, and no water, but the finest facilities in 100 miles along this road), I found that Dennis had actually been thinking seriously about that idea! This, from the guy an hour earlier at Hite was still nervous about making the next 10-15 miles to a place to camp! It initially sounded crazy to me, because it would mean a 108 mile day, twice what we had planned, and even worse, it was already 6pm, so we only had a couple hours of light left to cover 35 miles. I figured it would be easy to recite some horrors of a ride like this and scare the idea out of Dennis, but suddenly that didn’t work at all; while he would defer to my experience, he still wanted to give it a shot! So I brought out the computer to do some analysis of the distance and climbing, and it seemed doable, though it would be painful and slightly crazy. But my main thought was this: if we can pull it off, this will give Dennis the confidence to believe that he can complete any remaining ride scheduled on this trip. And with the idea and decision largely being his own, it would give him some ownership of our planning, rather than having to simply follow whatever I had planned, and that would surely give him some confidence too.

So off we went, and for the first few miles, the slight incline and slight tailwinds made it seem like a reasonable idea. The canyon we were riding up was incredible, with the towering red walls much larger and closer than those we saw on the descent to the river on the other side. Soon the wind turned around though, and slowed us down a good bit, but we pressed on, again using our alternating-drafting technique to conserve energy, this time silently communicating the lead changes whenever one of us would feel stronger than the other. So together we made it to our peak elevation, 1200 ft. above the river, just as the sun was setting.

There were plenty of good areas to camp on the side of the road where we could have stopped if we needed to, but still we pressed on, this time down a slight downhill, though still with a quartering headwind. As it got darker, Dennis turned on his blinking taillight, but luckily there had been almost no traffic on this road the entire day (we almost saw as many cows on the road as we did cars), and the road surface was pretty good.

We had one final uphill to push through, and we made it to the peak just as the final remnants of orange glow in the west equalled the light from the moon in the east. When we saw the twinkling lights of Hanksville down below and 4 miles away: elation! We’d done it! We rode/coasted down the final hill, and turned into the first motel we saw, just after 9pm, tired but happy and proud. For Dennis to have done his first century ride (100 miles) fully-loaded, over such terrain, was quite an impressive feat.

There was a burger joint just down the road that was luckily still open ’til 10, so we chowed down on a bunch more food, including a big ol’ chocolate shake with our burgers. The funny part was that we had lugged two days worth of dinners with us on this segment that are still unused! The connected gas station had a couple of good beers for sale individually, so of course we had to get those, and enjoyed them together sitting outside our motel room much later than usual, knowing that we’d have a short day tomorrow!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 8:36 am and is filed under 2009 Bike Tour, bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.