The weather forecast for the end of our trip looked grim. Snow and rain were expected in large amounts for the final weekend. I still had not managed to make it to Canyons to hit the freeride trails. They are only open Fri-Sun this time of year. Thursday looked to be the last chance for decent weather. I decided to ride from Park City Mountain Resort to Canyons Resort on Mid Mountain, crossing Iron Mountain along the way. It was a section I had never ridden before. The trail would dump me out at the bottom of the freeride park at Canyons. I assumed the trails were always open, just the lift would be closed on off days. I thought I was tough enough to climb up the hill between each downhill run. The ride was going to big 4+ hours just in time to get to Canyons and back. It was going to be a long day.
I started with a long climb up the one-way Armstrong climb. With it being one way, there is less erosion from braking. The trail is so smooth and hardpacked that it is like riding a dirt sidewalk. You can fly up Armstrong! I then spurred off onto Mid Mountain and then up Iron Mountain, a rocky climb over orange stones. The mountain is literally full of iron and you can see it reflected in the rock color. It was a tough climb and rough descent, but I liked it because it was remote, taking me on the backside of the mountain away from Park City.
A few more miles of turning over the pedals brought me to Canyons. I climbed to the top of the bike park only to find all the trails closed off. NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! I could see all the wooden features beaming in the sun with mounds of perfectly shaped dirt just wanting to be jumped. But I couldn't get to them! What a tease. I contemplated jumping the gait and hitting the trails. There seemed to be no one on the mountain. After a few minutes of thinking, I decided to ride back down the fire road and scope things out. It took about two minutes for me to realize that riding was not happening today. There was equipment sitting in the woods blocking the trails. They were working. No fun riding for me today. :(
It was a long ride back to the car in disappointment. I tried to make the most of it by taking a few trails I hadn't been on yet, climbing the other side of Iron Mountain up the many switchbacks on the Goldfinger trail. The ride was great, taking over 5 hours and giving me over 40 miles.
We hit the road for home two days early due to the incoming weather. Wyoming was going to get blasted with the first blizzard of the year so we wanted to get ahead of that. It was sleeting when we rolled out of Utah and snowed on us through the first half of Wyoming before we got ahead of the arctic front. It was 30 degrees in the storm and just 20 miles ahead of the front it was a nice 74 degrees.
We thought trouble was behind us once we hit Nebraska, but the extreme temperature differences caused some strong thunderstorms to develop around Lincoln. Shannon was driving at the time while I was drifting in and out of sleep. It was about 1 AM when we passed through Lincoln in the middle of a thunderstorm. We hit something in the road that Shannon said looked like siding. I sort of fussed at her for hitting stuff. No way did I think it was siding. I was starting to wonder if maybe she had been driving a little too long. Then traffic stopped. We sat for over 30 minutes before the police turned all the traffic around and sent us back to Lincoln. There was metal all over the road. We found out at the next gas station that a tornado came through just minutes before we got there. A metal building manufacturing site had been hit. The storm threw sheet metal all over the highway. So it did sort of look like siding.
My first thought was to detour into Iowa and go down I-29, but then a trucker said that a house trailer had been lifted by the tornado and put down right in the the middle of the southbound lanes. Great. After some studying of the map, we went west and then south into Kansas. It added a lot of time to our trip, but we were moving. We drove all night without stopping, taking turns every 4-5 hours. We encountered numerous traffic delays due to accidents and construction. It took us 5 hours longer to get home than it did to get out there.
Last year, I would have said it felt good to be home. This year, I did not miss home at all. We were living the life in Utah, no worries other than where we were to ride and eat at each day. And that was nice. :)
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