Moab and beyond March 2nd-9th

Finally we had arrived in warm weather. Moab was perfect. Great weather, and empty, there were so few people there. Our first few days we rode a trail called Klondike bluffs and baby steps. At the end you could hike into Arches national park. Great views and fun riding.

This is looking into Arches

The clouds were showing off to compete with all the cool rocks

The baby steps trail was mostly singletrack. With all sorts of narrow, curvy technical fun stuff.

This was one of our favorite parts, the trail was very cleverly constructed to go right under this giant mushroom rock.

And there were dino prints too, just right along the trail.

After a few days of riding we decided to let ourselves heal a little bit. We went to a place called wallstreet, where there are these giant cliffs right along the road, and did some rock climbing instead. There wasn't too much in our ability level that we could climb, but what was there was lots of fun.

Hanging out on wallstreet

Big cliff and beautiful blue sky

Itty bitty Emilie

We spent the week camping about 12 miles outside of Moab, on Willow Springs Road. We had a nice pull-off to ourselves and had some great sunset views.

While we were climbing, we noticed another couple there with a very cute dog, and they had mountain bikes on top of there car. We got to talking and decided to go riding together the next day. We did Porcupine Rim, the mountain bike ride of all mountain bike rides, and had a blast.

On the way up

The spectacular view from the top

Everybody at the top: us, Matt and Leigh, and Troy a guy who hooked up with us from Salt lake City (we left Tucker-the dog-in the car)

On the way down

and down...

Matt doing a crazy cool jump

We thought we'd be all full of sunshine and hot weather, but I guess they get storms in the desert too. The scenery was beautiful in a whole new way.

The day after the storm Matt, Leigh, Tucker, and the two of us decided to do slickrock; the other quintessential mountain bike ride of Moab.

One of the many ups- that dog is fast

Tucker and Mike cresting the slickrock

Once again, fantastic scenery

After a great week in Moab, we decided it was time to move on. We decided to do a quick trip through Arches National Park on our way to Albuquerque. Which of course was beautiful.

For all the geologists out there: the Moab fault

I believe this is called Wilson arch, just right along the highway

We also stopped by Mesa Verde National Park, but we didn't get too far up the road. It's 20 miles one way to get to the top and the cliff dwellings, and we were tired of driving all day into the wind, so we didn't make it all the way to the top. The scenery was pretty anyway.

Great clouds as we travelled through New Mexico

Shiprock in the distance

Now the main reason we had up and decided to drive off to Albuquerque was that we had decided it was time for us to get a dog. He is an absolutely adorable fuzzy crazy critter...more (lots more, we can't stop taking pictures of the beast) to come soon.