So, without further Ah-doo....
Day 3 we headed out of our home base in Hurricane, Utah back to St. George and the highly popular Bear Claw Poppy trail. This is the bike powered roller coaster I first referred to in my post on jelly (by the way, "Jelly" doesn't seem to be catching on as a saying, I might need to come up with something new).
Bear Claw is basically right in town and is a fairly short 5-6 miles out. Most people ride it as an out-n-back for a 11 mile round trip. We did it a little differently, adding the parallel Bloomington Mircoloop to take us back to the beginning of the super fun "BMX" section again. So, for us it was more of an out-n-halfback-n-out-n-halfback-n-off to the side-n-are we lost?-n-its raining-n-back thing.
Almost immediately it starts off with what they call the "Three Fingers of Death". Not nearly ominous as it sounds this is a series of very steep hills. There's a few ledges thrown in for added pucker, but no real drops.
Enter, all who dare...
The big-un.
A little-un.
Next up were what they call the Acid Drops. This is a series of smaller steeps. You can't miss them as they appear when the dirt turns from the distinctive SW orange clay to a white base.
Me doing my best Johnny Cash impression. "I stepped into a burning ring of fire."
Get it? All black? Johnny Cash?....nevermind.
Once you got past the drops the real woot-woots start. The BMX portion of the is some of the most fun I've had on a bike. Its a gradual downhill with oodles of gullies to whoosh through with berms and alternate lines everywhere. It was awesome. I hit 25.7 mph somewhere in this bit. That kind of speed was available without much work and without feeling out of control. You would dip down in a gully and zip back up a 15 foot bank on the other side like it was nuthin'.
Awesome.
As I said, it was so much fun we looped back and did it twice.
Later we tried to do the Prospector/Church Rocks loop, but it was raining and very windy. We rode straight into the wind/rain, gradually uphill for 2.5 miles before it started getting really nasty (sleet)and we decided to head back. While it took us 30 minutes to ride out, it only took about 10 minutes on the way back, amazing what a little downhill and a 25 mph tailwind will do fer ya.
Wet orange slickrock looks pretty ominous, but its not too bad.
Next up, I blog on the last day of the Utah trip (as long as no shiny objects distract me between now and then, but what's the odds of that happening?)
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