ORATB Part II - Here Be Dragons

The question mark.

Trail Creek was the motorized trail that I landed on in my Internet foraging. We started while the sun was at a gentle height and we mostly pushed up steep, loose, narrow trail for over an hour. As we gained elevation we could see some of the mighty peaks south of us in the Salt River range.

At the summit we chugged the other Gatorade and looked north into the non-motorized corridor that dropped to the Snake. We started following an eroded whisper of a trail that soon disappeared into a faint filigree of elk trails crisscrossing wide sagebrush meadows. Here I made the dire error of not consulting the map again and I chased a drainage that I thought was Pine Creek, but was at least two bowls removed from our objective. We gave up on finding trail and dropped precipitously. Every time we wearied of being raked by sagebrush, we ran into spring-fed nettle patches or hairy stretches of dense deadfall. And repeat. For 2,500 feet of descending.

Scratched, tired, disgruntled, we sat above the Snake and watched rafts full of tourists mosey by. Cy said we could hitch a ride across the river. I thought he was joking. Instead we picked our way over the treacherous rubble and snags on the east bank. I gasped and cried with the exertion of lifting my heavy bike and trusting clipless shoes on slabs of river rock.

After one too many sessions of my choked tears, Cy again suggested thumbing a ride from a raft and I acquiesced, seeing the purity of my route slip from my fingers but also seeing that it had taken 45 minutes to travel 100 yards of river bank.

A raft immediately picked us up and ferried us to the west bank. The women paddled fiercely against the current and the guys handed our cumbersome bikes up to us on shore. 

Blazing up the highway, I watched the east bank and started to realize how dangerously foolish my time estimates had been. All the drainages leading to the Snake were brutally steep and even after the bank mellowed, the riverside trail shown on the map did not appear. It looked like many miles of hard-to-navigate, marshy up-and-down. I was achingly disappointed, but also relieved to bail on the Alpine to Hoback leg of the route.

We rolled into Hoback Junction, set up all our gear on a picnic table and hid from the afternoon sun, buying lots of food to satisfy weird cravings and drinking boozy sloshies.

After 4 p.m. we emerged rejuvenated and booked it back along the Snake to Fall Creek Road, which we climbed and descended forever as the sun sank lower and became more of a pleasant companion and less of a tyrannical overlord. We pedaled up Mosquito Creek Road until we found a flat campsite next to the water. The moon was fat and bright.

Smoke rolled in thick the next morning and tinted the sun salmon. Our toes were cold and our phones were dead as we started climbing.

I saw many signs of wildlife through the trip, fresh scat and matted grass and dried hoof prints in the mud, but only saw one deer golden in morning light and a moose that ushered her calf into the pines and watched me as I passed. There were more signs of grazers: cow shit, fetid wallows, and the lawn mower effect of a herd of sheep passing over a ridge.

The Internet said it was only five miles, but the climb from Mosquito Creek to Mail Cabin felt interminable. It was very nice trail at first, meandering along the creek bank, but after the many false summits of Mosquito Pass, the trail degraded and steepened. I felt every match I had burned in the last three days, both in climbing and pushing my bike. I also really wanted to meet the Smithhammers at Mail Cabin but my overly optimistic timeline was getting away from me. I was slow, cranky, and thirsty, and the normally exquisite views into the Palisade range were obscured and watered down by the haze.

But we made it to the Mail Cabin intersection. While we had missed Bruce and Kat, a sit-down lunch of jerky and chips righted my mood. I was ready to face Mikesell, the best-established trail we’d ridden the whole trip.

While it’s a technical descent, I was so happy to be in familiar territory that I didn’t mind rallying such a fun downhill on a fully-loaded rigid bike.

We finished with massive grins and pedaled slowly back on Old Jackson Highway. Our friends greeted us at Grand Teton Brewing with cheers, beers, and string cheese.

No grievous injuries, no trip-ending mechanicals, no petty fights, and my stupid, arduous, beautiful route came mostly to fruition.

150 miles. Three nights. Three mountain ranges. Two breweries. 10% paved road. 60% gravel. 30% of some of the gnarliest singletrack you’ll find.

Would I recommend this route? No. Obviously not. It’s a little foolish and very demanding for a short time frame. But I’m already thinking about other ways to link together the newly illuminated spaces on my mental map.

ORATB Part I - 85 Miles, 24 Hours

I’m a sucker for loops. The symmetry, the lack of twice-crossed ground, pleases my soul.

Around the Block is a good road ride, not too hard and a nice way to bang out a century across state lines—Teton Valley, Jackson, Hoback, Alpine, Swan Valley, and back to Teton Valley. I rode it a couple years ago with a tall guy that liked to time trial. Real fast.

I’ve been obsessing over the idea of an “Off Road Around the Block” for exactly a year. On my first bikepacking trip with the Smithhammers we were casting around for a route idea and the thought occurred to me, but with a little research I realized it was too long and committing for us at the time.

I didn’t let go of the idea though. I bought the map and debated different route ideas. The dark spot on the map was Alpine to Hoback. Steep, tall peaks with dramatic drainages hedge the Snake River and its canyon, and while I trawled the Internet and begged friends for beta on the Greys River drainage, it remained the large and unnerving question mark on the route. Here be dragons. 

But I had my bikepacking set-up dialed and I had Cy as my a stalwart companion and I decided in May to shoot for Labor Day, when the flooded creeks and mosquitoes of early summer had subsided and I had that extra day of leeway to chase this fantasy.

We left from Victor at 5 p.m. on Friday and pedaled towards Pole Canyon, then onto the powerline cut. This slow push exposed the overarching theme of the trip—everything is harder than you expect it to be. No free lunch.

At the top of Pine Creek Pass we cruised dirt until North Rainey Creek, which was a long, fearful descent through head-high claustrophobic vegetation down a boulder-cluttered creek bed at dusk. We called every iteration of “hey bear” as we picked our ways and pushed and slogged down the canyon. We saw the moon rise over Rainey and met sunset on smooth gravel.

Rather than camp, we decided to mash big gears down into the valley, out of national forest and into farm land. We donned lights for the highway, resupplied with beer at the Swan Valley gas station, and death-gripped the handlebars on Highway 26 until we were safely across the Snake and on gravel again.

The next day was all gravel, nicely graded roads that wended along the Snake and the Palisade Reservoir in the Caribou range. The big climb over Jensen Pass was hot, so hot, the second theme of the trip—noon until 4 is the time of unbearable, intense sun and heat.

It was clearly autumn, not because many of the trees had turned, but because the vegetation was scorched by the same sun that was roasting us.

We made it back down to McCoy Creek Road, where everyone was driving back and forth with trailers loaded down with motorized toys or horses. Cy threw a front flip off a bridge into the reservoir with an audience of slack-jawed teenagers.

The road out of the Caribous was long and dusty with pointless climbs. We could see the beacon of Melvin Brewery’s big white building on a spit of land across the reservoir. We finally made it there and discovered they were serving street tacos as well as heady brews. We made little islands of gear on the deck and hoped no one minded our smell of untended body odor, salt, and dirt.

Fueled by several Mexican lagers, we remounted and pedaled drowsily with some groaning through Alpine and along the Greys River. Uncharted territory. I was optimistic because I had been underestimating the difficulty of the familiar sections, so here was a zone I couldn’t make assumptions about. The road was smooth and the river rushed aquamarine below us.

We cut up onto the Little Greys Road, found the next trail on the route, and made camp, but not before reclining in the shade until our afternoon fevers passed.

A man in jeans slowly rode his dirt bike past us…stopped. I shifted in discomfort, wearing only a sports bra and shorts, but he just wanted to make conversation. Sounds like he might’ve scared himself a bit, going up trails he used to hunt on when he was young, technical trails without the appropriate gear or a buddy. Maybe he wanted a little assurance that there were people out here in the sticks that would listen to him and appreciate that he hadn’t hurt himself.

He marveled at our starting point and said kind words. After fetching his truck he came back, and we sighed, but he just wanted to offer us Gatorades and Bud Lite. Yes please. You wonder sometimes, why are we so divided in this country when so many people are so generous in one-on-one situations?