Moab -- The Whole Enchilada

Whole Enchilada

If you ride one trail in your life in Moab, this should be it.  Depending on time of year, and luck with the weather, you start the ride at 9000', 10000', or nearly 11000' and mostly descend all the way to Moab.  How do you get up there? Well, you take a van, and since we had the great services of Rim Tours, we had our Van!

There was a very very very short conversation about riding from Moab up to the start of the Whole Enchilada.  I did not even ask the entire question before I was asked (politely) to take my endurance monkey mouth and stick a beer in it.

The very top section of the ride -- Burro Pass and Hazard County -- were closed because of a snowstorm the weekend before we arrived.  So we started the Whole Enchilada ride from The top of Kokopelli's trail.  It looked like this:

Here's the view with 6 dudes in the way:

A trail marker, and map.  look closely the map says "Whole Enchilada".  I was hungry all day

Many many people have written descriptions of this ride.  Find them here, here, or many other places.  So, again, I won't try the inch by inch description.  

I will say that the ride is everything people say it is.  Huge views, huge exposure, all the technical terrain you can shake a stick at, single track, slick rock, alpine glades and desert rocks all on one trail.  

Things I learned on this ride:

• Pinion does not give-way like Palo Verde trees do
• A well set-up dual suspension bike will "roll" some seriously gnarly gnar
• Push-up position is really the best way to go downhill
• My friends are quite acrobatic and can execute summersaults over their handlebars 
• One of my friends is capable of breaking any bike he is on for more than one hour
• Utah really is an amazing place 

If I lived anywhere near Moab, I would start counting the number of times I road the Whole Enchilada in a year, and try and make that number as high as I could.  I would like to go bak and try to ride the entire loop...including the climb.

I did make this video mostly of me riding the Porcupine Rim section of the trail, plus some other stuff.