Eric Moody: Biking in Las Vegas and Hurricane, UT

I had to go to a trade show in Vegas this week with E. Martin so, of course, we took bikes. The weather has been so gross in SLC this winter that any chance I get to head out of town I find a way to take a bike. Hurricane, UT (which is about 15 mins from where my brother lives in Saint George) was in the mid 60's this week while SLC only got to about 40 and still either snowing or raining every couple days right now. While my yard still has 3 ft piles of snow on it - check out the below pics from the trails near Hurricane:

We rode a loop that consisted of Goulds, JEM and the Hurricane Rim trails. Combining these 3 make for about a 22 mile mtb ride. It took us about 2 1/2 hrs to complete but we ran into some nasty mud on Goulds near the end of it, stopped to take a few pictures, and I got a flat. You can find info on the trails we rode here: http://www.utahmountainbiking.com/trails/hurr-rim.htm

The two pics below are from the Hurricane Rim trail overlooking the Virgin River.

This is E. Martin and my old mtn bike:

Here I am with the Virgin River below:

After riding we were able to go by my brother's place on the way to Vegas to clean up a bit. We were a little late for the show on that day but still made it in plenty of time - probably due to Martin's speeding ticket on the way. We had left SLC early and were on the trail by 9:30 in the morning!

Wednesday we decided to go ride in Boulder City, NV at Bootleg Canyon before the show (http://www.bootlegcanyon.org/). This is where InterBike holds their outdoor trade show demo/events. We had never been there before but it was easy to find and the trails were pretty well marked. Here we didn't have that much time to ride but we were able to sample a couple trails. We rode up East Leg to Boyscout and got to the top of the mountain from Boyscout. From here we headed back down and turned off to ride Caldera. At the end of Caldera we were pressed for time so we just took the Girlscout trail back to the car. Girlscout was actually very fun to come down as it is very fast with great, sweeping turns. East leg and Boyscout were rocky with some technical bits and a great climb to the top of the mountain on the east side of Bootleg Canyon.