A big hiking day, a hard bouldering day, and how about let’s throw in an epic mountain biking day too. Why not?!
Stage one: up the upper half of the canyon on pavement
Stage two: hike-a-bike up above 10,000 feet
Stage three: rip and dip it down…for 4000 feet
Yes, you read that right: 4000 feet
4000 sweet, glorious, non-switched-backed, hootin’ and hollern’ brakes on fire feet. Mountains to desert, baby. And like the other adventurers we’ve had on this trip thus far, we didn’t have to share it with a soul.
Stage four: the massive “up” out of the desert and back up the canyon to our campsite in the cool aspens.
While this stage was quite grim due to the heat, sand, tired legs and seemingly endless up up and more up, which had us all debating whether this was a smart idea, I hesitate to call this a true epic. Because no one complained! 😁
The rain stopped twice yesterday, and in both cases we took advantage of the window, first to do what ended up being a 9 mile hike around and above Jenny Lake, and later after dinner to do an 9ish mile bike ride down to Taggart Lake on the paved bike path. The first window closed abruptly while we were still out on our hike and dumped icy rain on us, but luckily we weren’t too far from finishing….and had our nice dry and cozy van to climb into to warm back up.