Utah Fall Shoulder Season Vacation – Oct 25th – Nov 4th 2010

Words and photos by Sharon Bader and Lee Lau unless otherwise noted.

Utah is always a great place to visit in the fall. With the Shoulder season making biking a bit more wet and dirty, our desire to put away the bikes and put on the skies is a bit premature. It always seems like a good idea to head south for a last minute summer reprieve!

This time instead of driving we opted to fly from Bellingham to Las Vegas and rent a car to drive to some areas we wanted to revisit.

These included:

St. Georges || Red Canyon – Thunder Mountain || Gooseberry Mesa Area || Monument Valley || South Rim of the Grand Canyon || and Red Rocks in Las Vegas

We packed out bikes into Goalie sized hockey bags, padded them with thinsolate and avoided the ridiculous cost of flying with your bike since Hockey bags are exempt from extra fees! This idea was inspired by this pinkbike article. We then drove to St. Georges and stayed with Cimmaron and Bryce. Our plan was to only stay there for two nights, but Bryce was able to ride Little Creek Canyon with us on the Thursday so we accepted their hospitality for a third night. Which was nice since it was FREEZING at Thunder mountain when we drove there for our day ride on Wednesday.

Day 1 – Zen Trail in St. George.

Bryce

Sharon

Bryce

Red Rock Bikes in St. George

Zen Trail View Point

St. George Utah – Zen Trail at EveryTrail

Thunder Mountain

On Wednesday we took the 2 – 2.5 hour drive from St. George to Thunder Mountain via Cedar and over Brian Head. There was ice on the road and the car temp guage indicated sub zero temps! All the way to Bryce! Maybe its good we didn’t camp…