Even though the Salt Lake/Park City trails are my favorite to ride I have to be able to ride some trails closer to home now that I live in Layton. My coworker Gary has been inviting me to go biking with him for nearly a year now and I have always mange to ditch him and go for a ride more south. However since I didn’t have a ride planned with Pat or Dustin I thought, why not?, I need to get more familiar with the trails up this way.
We went and rode the Ogden section of the Bonneville shoreline trail (see map below). We met after work at 5:00 o’clock at the Bues canyon trailhead with some other guys that work in my building, Ken, Glen, and Peter. I was anticipating a nice warm evening ride as I had extrapolated from the temperature increase throughout the day. Unfortunately the weather became cloudy to the south. Due to the multiple layers of clouds I thought the clouds moving towards the north east were the storm. So we decided to ride while remaining vigilant of the thunder storm near us. The way we rode the trail was in a loop (see map). It is a slight uphill which you have to ride partly through a neighborhood and a city water tank construction site. We rode to the point before you ride down to Rainbow Gardens at the mouth of Ogden Canyon and then turned south going to the upper trail.
As soon as we did that we noticed the lower cloud layer was coming towards us and it started to rain. Just my luck. The Ken fell into a bush (I wish I could have witnessed at one) and his tire started going flat. The upper portion of the trail heading south is very technical. More technical that you would expect. So trying to go uphill over all of that slick granite was tough. Peter just annihilated us on his 29-er while the rest of us struggled. My tires coupled with my technical inabilities weren’t made for that the steep rocky accents when wet, so needless to say by the time we got to Bues Canyon I was worn out. By the time we got to Bues Canyon, I was warned on how ”G-gnarly” the downhill was down the canyon. They weren’t kidding, I barely had enough energy to make it down the rock garden descent. If you didn’t have to carry the extra weight up the puke-ish hill climb, I would recommend bringing shin pads because of the rocks that got kicked up. Glen got a nasty goose egg on his shin (sorry no pics). Gary's bike-puter counted a 10.8 mile loop at the end.
Bottom line a good evening ride, got in some technical climbing and a great workout.
