66.85 mi / 5:10:44 time / 11.6 mph avg. / 33.0 mph max. / 4690 ft. climbing
Staying at Devil’s Canyon National Forest Campground

The free breakfast at the Best Western was impressive in scope, but I didn’t take advantage as much as I normally would, due to the all-i-could-eat last night. I had couple slightly sore hiking muscles, but the biking muscles felt just fine after the easy day, so by 9am we had made our final stop at the Moab City Market and said our last goodbye to that town.

Today’s ride was the first of the trip that didn’t include any state or national parks, so it was pretty much just a normal day of bike touring. Well, if finishing more than 3000 ft above where you started can be considered normal. Luckily the winds were mostly non-existant or favorable (until the last 15 miles) so we tackled the hills without undue difficulty.

There is basically nothing in the 54 miles between Moab and Monticello, (besides nice views of the La Sal and Abajo mountain ranges, and Wilson Arch on the side of the road) so we made it to Monticello in good time with lunch on the side of the road being our only major stop.

Perhaps the most “exciting” part of the day was when my chain fell off my rear sprocket. Dennis was right in front of me when it happened, but by the time I realized I needed him to stop, he could no longer hear me yelling against the wind. An oncoming car even beeped at him to alert him to the crazy guy jumping and shouting 80 yards behind him, but of course its rather difficult to divine meaning from a beep. Luckily I was able to fix the problem myself, and fifteen minutes later I caught up with him after he made the surprising discovery that I wasn’t on his tail. So we learned that I need to spend less time riding in his blind spot (where he reasonably assumed I was the whole time) and we need to do more checking for each other.

At the first gas station in Monticello we bought some Gatorade and ice cream, then some breakfast supplies, then some Subway sandwiches for dinner, and finally some drinks for our fourth transaction.

The decision not to cook in camp turned out to be a fortunate one, because although the campground was supposed to have water, it would not be tested until Monday, so it was recommended not to use it for drinking. The leathery old campground hostess gave absolutely no consideration to our situation, but we figured we’d have enough water to make it to the next town in the morning.

We got a cool spot in the nearly empty campground, backed up right against a small sandstone cliff, which might provide some shelter if the predicted rain got nasty. At the 7000 ft elevation, we’re surrounded by tall Ponderosa pines, which is quite a change from our previous campsites, where the desert vegetation was rarely taller than 10 feet.

Then I discovered the first flat of our trip, on my rear tire, from a piece of wire. Flats are annoying, but there’s no better place to have them than in camp when you have plenty of time and daylight. So fixing it was fairly easy, and in the process I discovered that my cassette lockring was loose, which may have contributed to my chain-jumping problem, so, the were two dead birds.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 2:31 pm 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.