4/1 Update: Reg & various ramblings
As soon as we published the google form the names started rolling in. Love to see it.
We’re getting a lot of inquiries about the water crossing. Here’s the deal. We will absolutely, under no circumstances, send you across the Dolores if we are even remotely concerned with safety. Yes, this is supposed to be hard and self supported but we’re not interested in swimming events. The other simple fact is that we have had a strange winter and no one knows what runoff is going to look like. Given that the Dolores is roughly 120mi/11.5k into the ride, we want to be sure there’s zero concern as people will no doubt be fatigued. We will scout the river crossing the week before the event and see how things are going. We will likely also check on it the Friday before the event to make our final call. We have a re-route in the hopper should the river be raging. The last time we crossed it we drove a 4×4 and it was pretty shallow and very mellow.
The only place we suspect any other route deviations may happen is above Unaweep canyon coming into Gateway. Those trails have been closed and will not open until just prior to the event. We did all the scouting we could over the winter but couldn’t ride these so there’s a little bit of uncharted territory there. Little Creek, Rim, & Ute Trails are the current route and it will likely stay that way.
Gateway General Store
The posted hours are 9AM-6PM. This gives you 11ish hours to get from Fruita to Gateway before they close. That’s 82mi and 7k feet of climbing. You’ll want to hit this resupply as it’s the only one on route. There’s some really fast miles at the start of this route, however, there’s also slow chunk between Whitewater & Gateway.
That’s it for now. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. Registration link can be found on the Westwater page.
Westwater registration is LIVE!
2/8 Update: Getting up to speed & how we got here
Scouting. Scouting. More Scouting.
Third time is the charm? Almost.
We’ve been out west three times to scout this route. The first time we were on cloud nine with how sweet the route was. Then we hit private property. This wasn’t apparent when snooping around online. The google earth images looked like it went. There was historical heat map data showing people cutting through this field. It didn’t go. The gate that blocked our path seemed like a new addition. We tried getting around it from multiple angles with no luck. Oh well. Back to the drawing board.
Fast forward a few weeks and we’re back out west. This time with a revised (and longer) route heading in the opposite direction. Scouting the route from Whitewater to Gateway was a treat. There’s some lovely country out there. We put eyes on all we could given trail closures and snow. We’ll have to spend some time out west prior to race day to get eyes on the single track, but it looks GOOD from what we can see! The ride down into Gateway should be a real treat.
Resupply in Gateway will be a welcome sight. This little general store is well stocked with all the goodies. They even had RC Cola tall boys!
From there we called it. We would be back for another trip out west to scout from the Dewey Bridge site to the top of the Sheep Creek climb. The Sheep Creek section is on Trailforks, MTB Project, RWGPS, etc. We aren’t worried about that for the time being. It definitely seems well established.
ROUND THREE. Back in the saddle. We drove out to Dewey and pushed south & east. Damn. Another dead end. University of Utah owns a small sliver of the course that has no alternate option. ARG. Back to the maps. There’s a way to go directly south out of Gateway that avoids the Sheep Creek climb all together. This jumps on the Kokopelli trail a lot earlier and will serve as our backup plan should the Dolores be impassable at the time of the race.
As long as everything goes to plan, from the top of Sheep Creek we’ll follow some dirt roads and eventually make our way to Dewey Bridge. This DOES involve a water crossing, however, we’ll put eyes on both crossing options prior to the race to make sure the runoff is manageable.
Before heading home we stopped in Rabbit Valley and scouted the Western Rim trail. This is a super pretty section of trail and is an awesome addition to the route.
At this point we’re pretty hands off until the week before the event. If we have any other updates we’ll add them on social channels as well as here. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. DM. Email. Whatever works.