Apparently the La Sal mountains, Peale Pass Trail is well known within the 4wd world as a technical OHV trail and that it can be exceptionally challenging after the spring melt.......yep, we didn’t know that!
The first indication of our bad decision was the mud pits, water crossings and snow banks in the shady parts of the forest. A liberal application of throttle got us through those. The next was the scree field/rock fall shelf trail crossings. This consisted of boulders the size of Coleman coolers that you had to ride over, through and around while not getting thrown off the trail and into the valley below. Next, this is free range cattle country....what do you do when your on a shelf trail and you run into a herd of cows, calves and bulls on the trail and they aren’t moving? You Honk, yell, yippee, do your best cowboy impersonation and pray they don’t decide to go through or over you instead. Next is more mud, super tight off camber switchbacks, boulder fields (one got me!), gravely descents that grabs your front tire, erosion ruts, etc....KB is a skilled rider and I just followed his line the best I could.
As we descended the Moab temperature went up, by the time we hit the bottom it was 100 degrees. We headed towards Moab for lunch when at about 50 mph the front end of my bike started to wobble like crazy. I get pulled over and it turns out I have a flat! It’s too hot to fix it in the direct sun so I limp it to a shade tree in the front yard of a vets office. I ask if they minded if we worked on it in their driveway and they were ok with it. I carried a tire repair kit and spare tube but, decided to see if a local repair shop could do the fix. We called one in Moab and he was still open. We pulled the wheel and lashed it to KBs bike and he ran it over and got a new tube and balance done. Once back we put the bike back together and ran into Moab for a smothered French fries lunch, restocking, refueling and headed west out toward Hurrah Pass to explore and maybe camp out towards the Colorado river. But, the temperature was over 100 degrees, no shade and our asses were dragging. So, we decided to get back on the road and head east to find a campsite. Once on the road we stopped and rested for about an hour in the shade of a ghost gas station and made the decision, due to the heat, to head back up into the La Sal mountains to camp in the cool altitude. The Aspen grove we found was cool, beautiful, no one for miles and bug free! This was the best night so far!
