CANYONLANDS NATIONAL PARK, Utah — For about 15 years now, Davis Farrar has held an unceremonious ritual. Like clockwork, it begins on the second Monday of July, typically ending in a three-day journey beneath October’s sanguine moon in a place they call the Island in the Sky.
Year after year, a sacred circle is traced in the sand for a century’s worth of pedal strokes along what Farrar and thousands of others have come to consider one of the world’s greatest mountain bike tours — the White Rim Trail.
“They start taking permit applications at 8 a.m. on the second Monday in July, and I usually send mine in at like 7:59 and a half-second,” said Farrar, from Carbondale. “It’s kind of become an annual thing here. It’s a great bike ride, not because it’s awesome singletrack, but because it’s just so nice to be in the desert with such awesome scenery.”
The 100-mile White Rim Trail circumnavigating the Island in the Sky portion of Canyonlands National Park near Moab is an American classic, carrying knobby-tired cyclists across the broad, deserted mesa wedged between the Colorado and Green rivers along a dirt road in the heart of canyon country. Views stretch for 100 miles across the Needles and Maze districts of Canyonlands, beyond the La Sals, Abajos and Henry mountains and 1,000 feet down to the rivers below.
For most, it’s a three-day trip, making use of conveniently spaced backcountry campsites and a hardy four-wheel-drive support vehicle carrying food, water and camping gear around the loop. Others will spend upward of 13 hours in the saddle riding the entire route in a day.
This autumn, however, the ritual for many has changed.
An unusually severe storm in late August led to a complete washout of the White Rim’s egress from the Green River at Mineral Bottom back to the mesa summit. The flash flood obliterated a mile-long section of the old mining road, carving wide trenches more than 40 feet deep through multiple switchbacks and rendering it impassable by motor vehicle and mountain bike.
“We use the word ‘road’ pretty loosely around here as it is,” said Paul Henderson, assistant superintendent at Canyonlands National Park. “That road went in when things were a lot simpler. It will take a certain amount of engineering work, environmental compliance work, etc., to repair it. At the earliest, we’re talking next spring or possibly next summer before repairs are underway.”
The Mineral Bottom Road falls just outside of park boundaries, on Bureau of Land Management property. The BLM has applied for emergency funding and could qualify for as much as $2.5 million to repair the road. Preliminary time estimates for repair work to be done range from two months to two years.
In addition to completing the White Rim loop, the road accesses a popular boat launch/takeout above Labyrinth and Cataract canyons, and its closure throws a significant wrinkle in the local recreation economy. Island in the Sky is far and away the most popular district of the park, attracting about 60 percent of more than 400,000 annual visitors. Of those, about 3,500 camp on the rim.
Already Canyonlands National Park’s reservations office is reporting cancellations of 25 percent to 30 percent for White Rim camping permits this fall, Henderson said, and given the loop-centric nature of mountain bikers, the equally popular spring season figures to be the same.
“That’s the biggest impact to the park,” Henderson said. “The White Rim is just a classic mountain bike trip, and with it not being a loop, that throws us as well as visitors a whole lot of curveballs.”
Park rangers have closed about a 15-mile segment of the White Rim Road to motor vehicles about 65 miles into the drive, along with three camping areas. Most mountain bikers still dedicated to the ride are doing out-and-back tours with SAG wagon support. Others are getting creative.
“I never backpack. I ride my bike. So my first response was, ‘I’m riding,’ ” Farrar said of his reaction to the closure. “Then my buddy suggested hiking in to Murphy Hogback, meeting the support vehicle and riding back (45 miles). And I thought: ‘Wait a second. There’s probably a message here: Do something different, you know?’ And it was really cool. I highly recommend it.”
Still others, such as Walker Fenton of Denver and Tom Verry of Aspen, simply grit their teeth and ride the entire route in a day, carrying their bikes up a makeshift hiking trail some Moab locals have scraped into the ground since the road washed out.
“The lady at the Island in the Sky ranger station tried to talk us out of it,” Fenton said. “She said the road was impassable, but some of the guides from Rim Tours told Tom about the hiking trail, so we decided to give it a shot.”
“The hike’s not that fun,” Verry added. “But you know, it’s like one mile out of a 100-mile ride. And the scenery is just unreal. I’ve been coming to Moab for 20 years, and this ride blew me away.”
