I guess 2008 isn’t over yet, so another trip could be in order before the year is up, but with the current schedule of events, I’m not seeing where it happens, but you never know. Seems a little out of place that this was my first moab trip of the year. Usually I’m up around 3-5 times a year.

Regardless of the frequency, it was a good trip.

We arrived friday night, plunked down at a site up by “The Gap” off sand flats road, threw together a fire and tipped back a few beers. We woke up in the morning to a beautiful day, and chowed some breakfast.

After the slow process of getting 8 people with full bellys moving, we rocked out to Sovereign singletrack for a nice ride. I’ve ridden Sovereign several times before, but it was in much better condition than any of the times I’ve ridden it in the past. There is some new singletrack which criss-crosses sovereign called Salt Water Wash that looks like a good time. I think it’s set up so that you can do it as a loop instead of a simple out and back now.

Definitely add it to the list for your next moab visit.

After some dinner at moab brewery, and another night of drinking beers and lighting farts around a campfire, we hit the sack saturday night. We woke up to gray skies on sunday, but I convinced everyone to head out for a big ride nonetheless. I proposed Gold Bar Rim-Golden Spike-Poison Spider. I’m a good salesman, and we started off the ride late morning sunday.

Note the gray skies, which soon turned to rain, which brought the lightning. We finally cried uncle, and hunkered down for the worst of it.

We finally got moving again, and started rolling and searching for the Golden Spike Singletrack. Unfortunately, it turned into a game of “find the cairns”. Fortunately, we got pretty good at it, and made it to the top of poison spider.

We rocked down poison spider, and proceeded to take a couple more wrong turns, but eventually made it back down. We got a few nice views on the way down as the weather finally broke as well.

In the end, I think everyone was glad we did the ride, but I’ve been informed that I’m never to give suggestions on difficulty or length of a trail again. Apparently my estimate of 4 hours and ‘easier than slickrock’, and the reality of 6.25 hours and a fair amount of walking and route-finding damaged my credibility.

Boo hoo.