We got up and out by 6:30 this morning to begin our ride through the weird, lunar landscape of that area of Utah. It's an odd sight to see... If somebody wanted to fake a moon landing or film a movie about the moon they could definitely do it here! (except we definitely still feel the gravity up hills..) We also saw a lot of ATV and dirt-bike tracks on the mounds. Nobody was out riding, but it would have been fun to watch!
It was really cold when we started riding, but were thankful because we knew soon enough the sun would start to boil us!
We also heard that this stretch of the road was really beautiful, so it was fun to see this sign. Usually it is signs like "rough road, next 7 miles" or "no shoulder, next 9 miles" that we see. And we've been laughing about signs for "cattle next 5 miles" then 2 miles later a sign for "cattle next 10 miles".... Come on road sign people.
Not too long after that we entered Capitol Reef National Park, awesome!
And it was seriously beautiful riding through there... crazy rock formations and you could see petroglyphs from the road. Beautiful beautiful.
And this was a cool, fun rock!
And there were lots of, what we later learned were, Mormon farms and orchards. They were beautiful but unexpected with all the surrounding desert and rock.
And don't forget that through all of this we were climbing... There were small downhills or flat spots every once in a while, and were more frequent for the first 25 miles than the last. Ad we were exhausted... That was seriously a lt of climbing. It was our highest elevation gain of the trip (over 6500 feet), even more than Monarch pass -- Monarch was higher but we climbed more today. There were some amazing views from the top. And we were so relieved to get to the summit sign, but then were confused when almost immediately after the summit we went up again. It wasn't too long of an uphill after the summit (but what?! Uphill after summit? It didn't make sense...) and the downhill was super. It was super windy though and we had to go slower than we would have in order to make sure we stayed stable in the wind. We also passed by some cows grazing on the side of the road. There were actually lots of cows near the top, they must descend to lower altitudes in the winter. Either way, it was odd seeing cows up there.
About 15 miles from the summit (with more downhll left for the morning!) we stopped at the Mountain Lodge which had a really great restaurant attached to it and all the food was grown in their organic farm -- cool! We indulged and had a wonderful sleep in a beautiful place. We were exhausted after our consecutive longest mileage day and then most elevation gain day.
There were geese there too!
Daily stats:
Mileage: 67.65
Elevation gain: 6522
Average speed: 8.2
Max speed: 39
Steepest grade up: 14%
Haiku:
Thought we'd climbed before,
This was a whole new level,
Up up up up down.
Our favorite sign of the day:
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