A UTAH CYCLING ADVENTURE
By John Wente
THE EVENT
This is my personal account of a week-long cycling tour in southwest Utah in June of 1997. This tour was the 1997 "Grand Tour" for Oklahoma Bicycle Society. OBS is a road cycling club located in Oklahoma City, but members are scattered throughout Oklahoma and surrounding states. OBS conducts one week-long tour, the Grand Tour, each summer. This was my second Grand Tour, the first having been in Door County, Wisconsin in June of 1995. OBS Grand Tours are organized and conducted by volunteers from within the club and are open to club members only. These tours represent an incredible bargain since there is no tour company making a profit. The tour participants pay a small fee (usually about $150) which pays for a luggage truck, snacks and soft drinks, a T-shirt, and usually two dinners and one or more night's lodging. On this tour, several "picnic lunches" were also included because there were several days when there were no services available along the tour route. Each participant pays for his/her own hotel rooms (usually two people share a room) and the rest of the meals.
When the tour is as far from Oklahoma as this one was (about 1100 miles), many participants will fly, while there are always some who drive. Fortunately, on this tour there were enough drivers that, as far as I know, no one had to put their bike on an airplane.
About 35 people participated in the Utah tour, although four or five did not ride bikes, but came along to serve as 'sag' divers. (In case anyone reading this might not know, 'sag' stands for 'support and gear'; for a cyclist 'to sag' means to ride in a vehicle.) For some reason, these tours seem to attract the more mature members of our club. Perhaps younger members are largely hindered from this type of vacation by the demands of new careers, young children, etc. In any case, the youngest participant on this tour was 36 and the oldest was 70. Most of us were in our 40's and 50's.
THE AUTHOR
I am a forty-something Electronics Engineer and have been cycling for about nine years. I live in Yukon, OK, the home town of Garth Brooks. I've done several week-long tours, but had never ridden in Utah nor in mountains. On this tour, I was riding a Giant CFR-3 road bike with a triple crank (necessary when one weighs nearly 200 lbs and is riding in mountains unless his last name is Indurain). At the time of this tour, I was president of OBS, but fortunately, I was not the tour director, so I had very limited official duties. I was mostly just a "consumer", which I greatly enjoyed.
GETTING THERE
June 21, 1997
I had only two weeks of vacation in 1997, so I didn't want to waste a couple of days driving out to Utah and a couple more driving back. Therefor, I flew to Las Vegas and rode a shuttle van to St. George, Utah, about a 2-hour ride. I was the only tour participant on my flight, but there were several others on flights that arrived in Las Vegas at around the same time. We all convened at one point to wait for the van which appeared a half hour or so before it was scheduled to depart for St. George. It was about 104 degrees in Las Vegas. Someone in our group asked the van driver if it was this hot in St. George. He replied that it was about as hot, but "not nearly as muggy as here in Las Vegas". The humidity was somewhere in the mid teens. We all got a grin out of that.
With the exception of one spectacular canyon which we passed through, the van ride was mostly boring with nothing out the window except vast expanses of desert.
Upon our arrival at St. George, we checked into the Holiday Inn, found our rooms and located those who had transported our bikes. After careful examination of my bike to make sure it had survived the trip intact, I took a short spin around the parking lot. All seemed in order.
That evening, several of our group went to the play, UTAH!, in an outdoor amphitheater. This musical drama is an account of the settling of this part of Utah by the Mormans in the later part of the 19th century. The play was spectacular, complete with a flood and a war between the Mormans and some local Native Americans. It was also very educational.
DAY 1 -- St. George to Cedar City
DAY 2 -- Cedar City to Panguitch
DAY 3 -- Panguitch to Bryce Canyon
DAY 4 -- Bryce Canyon to Springdale
DAY 5 -- Springdale to St. George
created by John Wente, jwente49@cox.net
last modified: July 6, 1998