Just in from trip number two to the desert.  What an amazing amount of beautiful terrain we toured through. Becoming one with your bike- as Eric says.  Ten through twelve hour days in the saddle will do that to you.  Bike Zen.

It’s once again time for The 45 Hours of Eric’s Birthday event:  Day 5, and we are up to hour 40, thanks to two amazing tours on the east and west sides. Unplanned adventures:  the best kind, when the weather stays within the range your outerwear is meant for and the calories and H20 are …just enough.  So that you are famished, dusty, worked, and deeply thirsty- in that cleaning-you-, out kind of way and not stretched so far past your limit you are incoherent.

Old and now new favorites:  discovering the world’s longest ‘downhill’ when my 6 hour mountain bike ride + run turned into the discovery that we were at the top of the new singletrack  above the UPS trail in Moab.  Up, up, up all morning- 27 miles from town to Warner Lake high in the La Sals, then down , down, down Hazzard Mountain trail to Kokopelli to UPS to LPS to Porcupine to the highway and back up to our campsite on Sand Flats.  Sixty miles of amazing views and singletrack:  paintbrush and wild cliffrose and penstemon blooming all over lower down, then up into wild iris, golden banner, delphinium.  So incredibly beautiful.  An amazing day.  To pedal into town and slam down 24 oz of cold, cold carbonated Coke after a day like that:  the best feeling in the world.

Yesterday: another adventure:  our ride over Hurrah Pass to Lockhart aborted at Hurrah when the rain we’d been riding in for an hour turned into a wall of endless gray to the south and west.  Riding back down into the valley, the rain let up and we decided to head down Kane Springs Canyon just to add in a few more miles.  The rain made the sand tolerable, the rain let up, and the canyon narrowed to an intrigue and temptation:  so on we went.  All the way out to Hwy 191 and Hole in the Rock. Early morning birds in the tamarisk and cottonwoods along the narrow winding creek sounded like the Amazon: warbling and singing and tweeting.  Sweet smells of rose and tamarisk.  Eric has always wanted to see Beyond the Rocks, so we rode back over to Pritchett Canyon and back out.  Deep, dark, omninously brooding clouds gathered over the La Sals all day:  riding out through Pritchett, lightening and thunder and dark sky mixing with beautiful afternoon light.  Another 10 hour day of beauty and wonder.  We get to do this, says EB, reminding me.  Yes, I think. How incredibly, incredibly lucky we are. To  get to do this.