Pre-Ride Altitude Adjustment
Ray, Jim and Paul flew in a couple of days early to acclimate to the 9000 ft altitude gain. We got a “cabin” in the ski village – a little different accommodations than we would be getting in the Hut tour. Bill, Todd and I flew in Monday afternoon so that we wouldn’t have to miss more than one Sunday at church. We spent about an hour and a half getting our bikes set up at Paragon Sports – those guys rock! They took good care of us, putting our pedals, seats and bar ends on their new 2004 Specialized Rock Hopper Comp bikes that we rented from them. The cost was about the same as it would have been to fly out our own bikes, but only if everyone already had travel cartons, etc. All in all, it was definitely the better option than bringing your own bike. After all, we weren’t racing or going on any technical single track – hence, a good front suspension mountain bike with durable components was all we needed. After getting our bikes, I rode up in the Gondola – but took the wrong one, and had to do some single track for a couple miles on the way down – with no clipless shoes (but clipless pedals), no gloves, no helmet and a bag of stuff I bought at the bike shop – yikes! It was more dangerous than the next 7 days of riding. Bill and Todd had the great idea of climbing “boomerang trail” – an almost impossible hill to come down let alone climb up – almost straight up from town to the Village. Bill, being the old fart like I am, climbed a lot of it, but not all of it (which is what I did in May when I came out for a visit). Todd, being the “”king of the mountains” that he would be for the trip, climbed up the entire thing, with very few touches/stops. This is after less than 3 hrs of “altitude acclimation”. It would be shades of things to come.
We took the gondola down to town, and ate at one of the Italian restaurants for dinner, where the food was excellent. We then came back, packed our bikes and started packing the boxes to mail to our hotel in Moab. We all wrestled with trying to get some sleep that night, morning could not come quickly enough.
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