May 13th, 2019 / (170km/106miles, 2600hm/8530ft elevation gain, 10hrs)
I start around 6:30am again and re-join UT-12 towards Escalante. It’s a beautiful part of the highway leading thru green fields that nicely contrasts with the red stone that is all around.
I’ll keep the update short for today. It was an exhausting ride. While getting to Escalante is pretty easy – and I had an excellent belated breakfast there in a nice grocery with a cafe bar – , it gets hotter and hotter afterwards. So the ride itself gets more exhausting. And the scenery at the same time more and more overwhelming. The whole route to Boulder is most likely the most impressive and breathtaking part of the whole journey. The sheer size of the scenery, the dimensions, the vast space laying below the road at some scenic points is just awesome. The photos don’t manage to capture this appropriately.
I take a short break at a gas station with a grocery store when I arrive in Boulder, UT (not CO!) around 3pm. And then decide to tackle the 64km to Torrey which would have been my next stop based on the original plan. It’s only 64km, but there’s another 1400 meters in elevation to climb over a pass at 2900m. While slowly fighting my way up the steep climb – all the elevation is gained on the first 20km probably – the tire and tube of my back wheel blow up – the tire has been completely worn down, I have no clue if this was due to the crash some days ago where I was breaking sharply on gravel or whether this is the normal wear given the heavy trailer additionally putting load on the back wheel. But no matter what, it’s gone. So I spend some 30 minutes unpacking my stuff for repair, dismounting the back wheel from the bike, taking tire and tube off, putting tire and tube on, mounting the wheel and packing everything up again afterwards. Then I continue and manage to reach a motel in Torrey at around 7:30pm. I’m totally exhausted for today.