Trans Utah – 2-Epic

Southern Utah is a spectacular chunk of planet earth. Deserts, canyons, mesas, mountains – it’s all here. There is good reason so many national parks and monuments dot the region.

There is also an abundance of epic singletrack and accessible but remote jeep trails, game trails & ATV trails. The area is ripe for a self-supported epic MTB route.

Trans Utah is my brainchild…my vision is to string together a route from St George to Moab that can be done in about a week under the self-supported ethos. That’s a tall order. I’ve got a couple thousand miles of exploratory GPS files and am still working on the first third of the route! The rough schedule is like this:

Oct 2, 2008: StG to Escalante. No finishers this year due to an untimely storm, so…
Sep 26 4AM, 2009: StG to Boulder.
2010: Boulder to Moab
2011: StG to Moab

The 2008 edition was blown apart due to in impending early winter storm. Some riders left a day or two early while others didn’t have that much flexibility in timing so did not start. Nobody finished as the storm blew in while the first rider was on the Virgin River Rim trail.

It’s wild country. Check out Dave and Marshal’s 2008 trip reports.

Complete route beta for 2009

The new Powell point to Boulder segment is complete. Great Western Trail challenges abound.

Complete track data for the 2009 route is here. This .zip file includes track data and waypoint data.

More descriptive information for the waypoint data is here.

NOTE: you must use GPS to follow this route. It simply is not practical to follow this route using conventional means due to the nature of the route being a combination of varied trails, jeep roads and roads.

SPOT tracking

Scott Morris has set up a tracking page at http://trackleaders.com/transutah. Let me know ASAP if you would like to use a SPOT tracker device and have not yet asked for one.

2009 Ride Schedule

Friday, Sep 25th there may be some communal shuttling. The idea here is to get vehicles parked in Boulder. Friday evening riders will meet at my house for BBQ and/or route questions.

Sat, Sep 26th, 4AM: meet at the Mormon Temple in St George. We’ll roll the first ~12 miles all together to the Sunshine trailhead.

Rules

Rules are scarce for this event for good reason: it is difficult enough that if you have what it takes to get it done, you know what the rules are. Self-support ethos reigns supreme. You are doing this for you. Be safe. Have fun. Enjoy every vista, sunset, overlook you encounter. Do it all yourself, or share whatever you want with a teammate(s) with whom you’ll complete the route. Teams or individuals are all good, just declare intentions at the start.

The rules that you should adhere to reside here: http://www.climbingdreams.net/ctr/ctr_rules.html. Teams are an additional allowance for Trans Utah.

This is a breathtaking, but challenging route. This is not for every MTBer. In fact, there are probably only a handful of riders ready for this sort of challenge. To do this safely you must know how and what to pack for a 3+ day extended period in the wilderness, have the legs to haul it all over creation, have the skills to keep it rolling on-route, and be proficient at generating good luck.

Discuss Trans Utah here. Trans Utah related blog posts are here. Note: the old TU forum is overrun with spam and ignored for now…