Mt. Nebo Followed by Some Mountain Biking

Mike and I decided to be really crazy on Saturday and hike Mt. Nebo (elevation 11,928 feet) and then go mountain biking afterwards since both of us have always wanted to try out some of the mountain biking trails off the Nebo loop.

The hike up to the peak of Mt. Nebo was harder than I expected it was going to be. I read that Nebo's trail had an average grade of 12%, but then I discovered as I hiked that the trail goes up and down the whole time! You'd gain some elevation and then immediately lose it. And there were two really steep sections that just went straight up the ridge line. I don't get why they didn't put switchbacks into those sections of the trail. It made it hard to get up and come down. Once we got to the top, it was an amazing view! And a great sense of accomplishment.

And then the mountain biking. At the very first, I could definitely feel that I had hiked a peak just a few hours before, but then my body seemed to hit a second wind and I felt great! The Blackhawk trail was interesting. We tried a shortened version of it that was supposed to be a lasso shape. The initial 1.5 miles had quite a bit of climbing but then we had a very long downhill that as I was going down it, I was dreading that we'd have to come back to climb it. After that, the trail was way fun! Little ups and downs the whole way to the Blackhawk campground. At that point, I was thinking it would be good to turn around and just do an out-n-back since we were already at mile 5. But Mike wanted to try the lasso. So we went off hunting down the trails for it. And we had a hard time finding the trail intersections! We found them, thanks to Mike's GPS and mad GPSing skills, but we had another monster amount of elevation to gain to get back up to the paved road which we supposedly had to cross to find the trail that hooked us back up with the Blackhawk trail. But by the time we made it to the paved road, both of us had lost all of our gas and energy. So I put my foot down and demanded that we take the paved road back to our car. And we did. Apparently, Mike's suggestion to continue on the trail was just a test to see what I would do. Ha ha!

We might have bit off more than we could chew since Mike is barely back on the bike post-broken-collar-bone, and I'm still-out-of-shape-post-China-and-no-exerciese. But we survived!

panaramic view from the top