Mormon Canyon

It's been two weeks since my last bike post. The reason for that was on our last ride my buddy got a flat and screwed up his rim pretty bad to where he had to take it into the shop to get fixed. Well it wasn't ready by last Saturday so we took a week off. I thought of maybe getting up and going on a quick bike ride up a trail that I've done a few times now, but then I decided that sleeping in until 11:30 am was a much better use of time and resources. However, today we resumed the biking experience through Caribou National Forest. We started at the Scout Mountain trail head and headed along the east bench of Scout Mountain. We've previously ridden this part of the trail when we did our Scout Mountain excursion (last bike blog). We past the pond and continued along the trail that would eventually take us up to Scout Mountain until we came to a fork in the road. Instead of heading north towards Scout we turned south and headed towards Old Tom Mountain but we didn't climb to the top. After about 3/4 of a mile we turned off the Old Tom trail and headed down Mormon Canyon.
The trail down Mormon Canyon is more single track than not. It's accessible and wide enough for bikes, horses, and dirt bikes but not ATVs or Jeeps. It's a fairly steep, and rocky descent down the mountain dropping about two thousand feet in a little under three miles. The beginning of the track rides down the ridge of the mountain so there were many times where not paying attention would send you tumbling down. A lot of the downhill is fairly rocky as well creating a steering/braking problem. It doesn't matter if you're going up or downhill, a rocky trail feels like biking over ball bearings. Regardless of how much pressure you put on the brakes or how far you lean back so as to not go over the handlebars, those rocks take you on the trail they choose. It gets especially annoying/frightening when one side of the trail is that roll down the mountain I was talking about earlier. That part was coming down the mountain into the canyon. Once you get into the canyon part of the trail you don't have to worry too much about a lot of rocks, the tree roots take care of that problem. Sometimes they can be just as bad, if not worse, then the rocks. However, they do make for some nice little jumps to play around on. The canyon trail crosses the stream quite a few times so it makes for a nice cooling effect when riding through. Unfortunately though this week's ride didn't go flawlessly. I ended up getting a flat in my rear tire and had to stop to repair that. I don't think I rode on the flat too long because my rim doesn't seem to be bent at all. I easily found two holes that needed repairing and patched those up fairly quickly. Thinking that I had fixed my tire I put it back on and kept on down the trail. About a mile down I realized that there must have been more, smaller holes that I couldn't find because the tire ended up going flat again. Not wanting to deal with finding and patching the holes I just switched out tubes with a spare that I had brought.
I think that we spent just as much time driving and placing vehicles as we did biking. Like I said, we started at the Scout Mountain Campground just southeast of Pocatello and came out on the other side of the mountain near McCammon. Up and over the mountain the ride was only around eight miles, but driving back was about thirty-three miles. So lets calculate this out really quick...it's twenty-six miles from my house to where we had to drop the jeep off at the end point, then thirty-three miles to get to the start point, then another thirty-three miles after we had finished biking to go pick up the start vehicle. Grand total...ninety-two miles (at $4.10/gallon) to bike a measly eight. I figure that's just about the same, if not more, that I would spend in gas if I had gone waterskiing for a couple of hours. Just like waterskiing though, it was well worth it.

I still got a fair amount of pictures for this trip but not as much as the other trips. Two reasons why: 1)I've already ridden and taken pictures of the first half of the trail and 2)the second half was all downhill and most of the times it's too exciting of a ride to stop and take pictures.

Scout Mountain Trail Head

Overlooking McCammon

Old Tom Mountain (Mormon Canyon to the left)

Mormon Canyon Descent

Mormon Canyon

Ridgeline Descent

Check out the moon just behind my head

The tree spanning the trail made for a great little obstacle

Remember those tree roots I was talking about?

As always look for the complete collection of pictures of this trail and other trails at
http://picasaweb.google.com/tjdhulst

This blog will be the last blog about Pocatello mountain biking for about a month or so. At the end of this week I will be heading back home for about three weeks. Those weeks will be full of waterskiing, waterskiing, and hiking Havasupai Falls. Maybe I will be able to hit up a couple of trails around Ogden. I will be posting news on waterskiing and the hike trip as well.