MOAB

What else is left to say about Moab?  Best town in southern utah, cool people, good restaurants, stunning setting, sweeeet riding...  But...2 years in a row and 4 visits in the last 6 years...too much in my opinion.

That said, if you twist my arm...  And there's that new trail, Hazard County.  Which was itself reason to visit Moab.  So I conned the others to make the haul across Utah state for 1 day of riding.  Sweet.

Last year's hazard county ride was unbelievably fun and epic.  Top three in a lifetime ride.  This year we were expecting nothing less.  The dark clouds hovering above the La Sal mountains had a different idea...it was freezing and raining when we got out of the shuttle van so we donned the rain jackets and started pedaling.

Hazard starts out on a gentle downhill slope with sublime singletrack that winds in and out of the juniper trees, with spectacular views of the Moab valley below.  The trail was super slick with fresh mud, lucky me had big tires and had a blast.

Mike was the hero of the weekend, Porcupine Rim is not an easy trail on any bike and he did the whole thing on his 29er hard tail...studly.

Rain jackets...

As Hazard trail merged to Kokapelli, the trail had suffered under the rain and the soil had turned into something like nearly-set concrete.  Without a ton of momentum you couldn't go 10 meters without your bike coming to a complete stop.  Luckily for us Eric ignored the warning from the shuttle driving and bombed down, leaving the rest of us to walk...  After a bit the trail dried out and became rideable, but we missed a nice fun section of fast double-track.  Damn.

Since last year there had been a fairly big forest fire, and it wasn't too long ago as the burnt smell was still in the air and riding through the burned-out section was pretty surreal.
The beauty about this trail is that you descend for an hour plus, all single track, then come to the very top of Porcupine Rim (stunning views, don't let your gaze linger as that is a cliff there...).  From there it's another 1-1.5 hours of ridiculous fun in the hot desert - rain jacket long ago discarded.
By this part of the trail the hard tail was starting to kick Mike's ass a bit.  Long washboard sections of sharp rocks.  But it was beautiful as heck and a stop every now and then would let you to look around and appreciate the Moab desert. 
During the last 30 minutes or so we passed and got passed by a fairly old guy who was out there keeping it real on two wheels.  Pretty cool. Hope I'm half that active when I'm his age.
All in all a extremely excellent ride.  Would do it again in a heartbeat.  The conditions mixed it up for us and made it interesting.  But one day was all we had, from there we headed back to Vegas to board planes....