It was cold. It wasn’t supposed to be cold, but that doesn’t really matter, it was cold.
The forecast had indicated a nice mid 80’s weekend. Unfortunately the weather hadn’t got the memo. KB and I woke up to a chilly 46 degrees last Monday morning. The same morning we had scheduled a shuttle to the top of the Kokapelli trail in the La Sals. We weren’t prepared, that’s a bit of an understatement.
Neither of us had really any idea where we were starting our ride. That’s kind of the convenience of hiring a shuttle. I had planned a little bit and brought along a warm jacket but beyond that, our cold weather gear was non existent. After the hour drive up the mountain, the van pulled over. We jumped out only to be bombarded by an icy wind ripping across the area. We grabbed our bikes and went as fast as we could. After just a few minutes of riding it was painfully obvious that this wasn’t going to be a lot of fun. KB was close to tears. We were both wearing summer riding gloves, but mine were long fingered. Being the gentleman that I am, I gave her mine and I dawned the turquoise ones.
And then it started to snow. We realized at this point our only real option was to buck up and ride as fast as possible in the hopes of reaching lower altitudes before one of us resorted to killing the other to stay alive. My hands went through the all too familiar transition of cold to aching, but then continued on their trip to completely numb. I’m not referring to the, “my hands are so numb, but I can really feel them because they hurt.” No this was the real deal. I could not feel the ends of my fingers. They didn’t hurt. They weren’t cold. They just weren’t… I noticed that they had gone purple and it was almost impossible to brake. I learned that if I leaned forward a bit a could use the palm of my hand to actuate the lever. The upside to all of this is, I couldn’t feel my fingers so it didn’t really seem that bad. The part that really sucked was when we finally got out of the clouds and things started to warm up. I had to stop and let my hands thaw which was ten times more painful than the cold.
Once we were out of the snow, things became nice and we enjoyed the LPS. The wind was still ripping but it wasn’t icy anymore. By the time we reached the Porcupine Rim, both of us were ready to be done. The fact that we went from pretty cool (awesome for Moab) singletrack to a dirt road didn’t help our moral. The howling wind was the salt in the wound. I swear that jeep road was the longest road I’ve ever ridden on…
To top off the nastiness, my camera chose to stop working right when things warmed up. I got two pictures of Castle Valley and then tried to get some of KB riding when the SLR decided it wasn’t going to take pictures anymore. I was pretty pissed by this since I hoped to at least salvage something from the trip by writing about it in Cycling Utah, but a story without pictures isn’t much of a story.
So for your enjoyment, the two pictures I got.
Well, we hope to get out and ride the Whole Enchilada once the snow melts. Stay tuned if you would like to be invited…
Ride more.