For Spring Break this year, my 11 year old son Jack, and I and a couple of other dads and their sons spent the week in Utah with the goal of riding the White Rim Road in the Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. The “Road” is a reasonably well maintained “Jeep Trail” mostly devoid of any signs of civilization aside from a handful of primitive camping sites and some rather decent enclosed pit toilets. The camp sites are merely designations – there are no facilities other than proximity to one of the aforementioned pit toilets – they’re mostly just a sign and some markers showing you where you can and can’t pitch a tent.
If you are superhuman and don’t require much water or food – you can ride the 100.7 miles of White Rim Road in a single day – the level of fitness and logistics required to do this are beyond my comprehension. Instead, we opted for the four day, three night tour (there is a three day tour as well). RimTours our well equipped and very capable tour guide company provided a decent range of bikes, a support truck for transporting our camping gear, food and luggage and two extremely competent and affable tour guides.
In addition to the White Rim Road – we had a couple of days either side of our 4-day tour so we explored some of the local bike trails and hikes around Moab.
If you’re thinking about doing this trip – I’d highly recommend RimTours – my son and I will likely make this kind of thing an annual event and I wouldn’t hesitate in using RimTours again for one of their other tours.
There are 7 parts to this post (including this one). They are, in chronological order :
- Slick Rock
- Day 1 – White Rim Road : Shafer to Airport
- Day 2 – White Rim Road : Airport to Murphy
- Day 3 – White Rim Road : Murphy to Potato Bottom
- Day 4 – White Rim Road : Potato Bottom to Horsethief
- The legendary HyMasa and Captain Ahab
I’m posting this because I couldn’t find much information on-line – hopefully these posts will provide you with some additional information and inspiration to make your own trip. Enjoy.
Rich Sharples' Weblog 
I’ll send you an email with a link to the dropbox folder – your free to use what you want. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence applies : http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
– Rich
Hi Rich. Thanks for the seriously great blog post. I’ve posted about it on our FB page https://www.facebook.com/rimmountainbiketours. We’d love to get high-res versions of your photos. Do you use dropbox? Or some other photo-sharing site?
Oh and the dust – seriously – rent a bike !
Thanks…I ride a Mukluk with a newly installed Bluto but thinking the ground clearance might be tight. My wife just bought a Salsa Spearfish but the tires are too narrow for me…Renting looks to be a great option.
I rented a Santa Cruz 5010, my 11 year old a Juliana (female bike) – both were great bikes and brand new. You really need FS and some decent travel. RimTours List.
Excellent. We were in Moab in February and bitten by the bug. We want to do a White Rim ride and with the multiple offerings from various tour groups the information you provide is invaluable. Interested in what type of bikes you used. Nick