North America > United States > Utah > Moab > Articles > Moab - Mother Of All Biking Towns

Moab. It sounds more like a brand than a town, a catchy street label that any dusty, scab-covered, self-respecting mountain biker would shun if only it weren’t, well, Moab. This remote Utah town was founded as a quiet Mormon outpost in 1855, and boomed through the 1950s and ’60s as a uranium-mining centre, but is now propelled almost entirely by outdoor adventure.

Like other towns of its kind, such as Queenstown in New Zealand, Moab offers adrenalin in any dose. You can raft rivers, jet boat, ride quad bikes or try an extreme form of four-wheel driving in which you remove your vehicle’s doors, put on tyres like doughnuts and head for tracks with names like Hell’s Revenge.

But Moab’s signature activity is incontestably mountain biking. Here, bike racks are as plentiful as car parking spaces, and bike shops are outnumbered only by motels, restaurants and T-shirt stores. Even chain motels, usually so unapologetically generic, boast about in-house bike shops.

You sense Moab long before you see it, with the traffic betraying the town. Suddenly there are great numbers of vehicles appended by bikes, standing atop roofs or hanging from behind RVs. And then it appears, this modern town set in a prehistoric land of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints.

Moab is surrounded by names that ring with mountain-biking familiarity: White Rim Trail, Bartlett Wash, Poison Spider Mesa Trail, Porcupine Rim and most famously – and famously challenging – Slickrock Trail. More even than the town below it, the Slickrock Trail is a de facto brand. In Moab you can stay at the Slickrock Campground, eat at the Slickrock Cafe and hire your bike at Slickrock Cycles. It’s a 20-kilometre loop that has defined Moab and mountain-biking dreams.

Around 100,000 cyclists follow the painted white dashes across Slickrock’s petrified dunes each year, despite – or perhaps because of – its reputation as the world’s most difficult mountain-biking trail. Originally designed for trail bikes, it’s now a swarm of pedals and pumps, a zenith you work up to, not a starting point. I figure on two days of riding Moab’s myriad other trails, then I’ll think about Slickrock. What’s most inviting about Moab cycling is that it need not be just about testosterone and crunching gears. Like Queenstown, Moab has great natural beauty to back up its bluster. Bookended by national parks, the town is bunched on one bank of the Colorado River. Red rock punctures the desert at every turn, and Utah’s second-highest peak, Mt Peale, hovers snowcapped and near on the horizon. Cycling trails can be chosen as much for scenery as difficulties.

On the White Rim Trail you can plunge to a low shelf inside Canyonlands National Park. At Bartlett Wash, a compact playground for cyclists, the sandstone is layered more perfectly than pastry. Even Slickrock has views onto Moab, the Colorado River and Arches National Park.

My Slickrock preparations begin at the edge of Arches National Park, on the Klondike Bluffs Trail, a rough overland road where one of the obstacles to ride around is dinosaur footprints. Much of the journey is on the eponymous slickrock, the smooth sandstone named because horses found it so slippery. Beneath the fat tyres of a mountain bike it is, conversely, more like stickrock. On angles at which you’d probably turn an ankle, bikes hold fast, seemingly defying natural physics. At first encounter it’s an intimidating question of finding the line between gall and fall.

Angles are not my immediate problem on the ride to Klondike Bluffs. On the slickrock I fail to see a gap between rocks, and the bike stops but I do not, finishing up on my face on the next rock. I am comforted that I haven’t landed in the cactus that lines the trail, and also that I’ve fared better than my bike, the front disc brakes of which have already bounced into disrepair. Part of my afternoon is spent back at a Moab bike store fitting new brakes.

A couple more falls on the swirling sandstone of Bartlett Wash the next day and I’m dotted in the mountain biker’s tribal markings, the scabs and abrasions known as ‘bacon’ that come with the inevitable tumbles. In Moab, it’s on almost every visitors’ menu (as well as their knees and elbows).

On my final morning in Moab, I drag my rashers onto the Lion’s Back, a ridge that looms above the town. Across its top and onto Swiss Cheese Ridge, Slickrock runs its rollercoaster course, past encouragingly named features such as Abyss Viewpoint and Icebox Canyon. Slickrock comes complete with its own practice loop, a three-kilometre challenge to determine whether you’re slick enough for Slickrock, and it’s here that I head first. Even the practice loop, however, requires some astounding moments of bravado, with descents like cliff faces and a leap from a ledge into sand almost guaranteed to pitch you over the handlebars. It’s suggested that it can take about four hours to ride the Slickrock Trail, and I’m starting to think I could spend all four hours just talking myself down any one of these descents. I take comfort that it’s a rare person who doesn’t push his or her bike at some point on Slickrock.

Across Slickrock’s orange rock I begin, the white dashes almost superfluous beneath years of black tyre marks. The trail is like an enormous, arid set of moguls, with climbs worthy of ropes balanced by vertiginous plunges. I remember the words of a bike-store owner in town – “Anytime you see something that freaks you out, get off and walk it. This place will bite you on the ass real quick” – but my brain, intoxicated with adrenalin, is goading me to career down each slope. The climbs have their own pitfalls, and ahead of me a rider wrenches at his pedals so hard his chain snaps. I miss a pedal stroke and puncture my shin on the chainring. My hands have skipped calluses and gone straight to blisters, and I have enough bacon to feed the state of Utah. I am having a masochistic kind of fun, close to elation, though it dwindles relative to my energy.

Over the last few kilometres, I join up with Jim, a rider from Colorado. With Moab so near to the Colorado border, Jim is to be found at Slickrock most holiday weekends. He grinds up steep pinches that stop me quicker than brakes, my bike peeling off the rock and bouncing – with me – back down the sandstone. Slickrock’s 20 kilometres start to border on 200 kilometres and, by its end, the greatest danger of accident is that I’ll simply fall over exhausted.

• More from Andrew Bain