Koko 3 trip report and pictures

Day 3

Day 3 found both the bikers, made up of Mark Saucy and Bodie Garside and the support vehicles, made up of myself, Murrie and Mike Alcorn and Rudi Wiens heading out on dirt for the first time together. This trip is a two part journey taking the Hayduke trail, (Mountain Bike version) from Moab Utah to Big Water Utah. Big Water is at best a small village on the northern shore of Lake Powell just as before the lake moves into Arizona on Hwy 89.

The Mountain Bike version is over 400 miles long so we broke it into two trips, this one being the northern section following a number of jeep trail from Moab to a remote and obscure road junction of the Poison Springs canyon road and Highway 95 north of Hite Utah.

In our planning it's always difficult to figure out ahead of time what are appropriate camping stops for the bikers. I have driven the trail in my Jeep and had some idea of what I thought might work but slight grades in a Jeep where I wouldn't notice any substantial climb are a completely different thing to those peddling.

Here are two maps showing the grade and mileage of the first couple of days on the trail. The trail "offical" start, McDonald's in Moab to the Lockhart Basin trail ending on Hwy 211. They are shown in the Red and Black lines on the map.





We started about 9 miles in from the McDonalds.

There is some very scenic sections along the beginning which all enjoyed.















This section supplied the only "difficult" rated section for the vehicles. The narrow canyon leading into Lockhart Basin wouldn't be on the higher end of the scale compared to other difficult Moab trails, but we weren't driving extremely modified vehicles, some barely above "stock". In addition we were heavily loaded with equipment, food, water and fuel for the next 9 trail days.

While the bikers just dismounted and walked over the most difficult sections we had to wheel them. Needless to say the bikers got several miles ahead of us as we struggled up the canyon.

For some reason no one took any pictures of our slow progress up the difficult section. They did take some movies so here is a couple different perspectives.



Thanks,
Fred
Explorer 1

Oh my aching nether regions--the senior member.

Looked like a awesome trip, wish I could have been there for that face plant .

Day 4


Morning came and the air was cold/crisp depending on wither you were sensing it from being next to a fire or from being behind a set of handle bars. We lingered around the morning fire and took our time breaking camp. I think there was some desire to at least have the sun show itself over the eastern horizon before the bikers started that morning. Once they felt the warmth of the sun on their faces the headed off down the trail to complete the second part of the Lockhart Basin trail.





The black line is the Lockhart Basin trail.



We were at the beginning of the day about 1/3 of the way. But the first part had the most uphills and was rated as difficult so we were expecting to make the pavement, where this section ended, by lunch.