Mountain bike Vernal

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Vernal Area

The Best Bike Trails You've Never Heard Of

Some say I'm lucky to have the job I have, or blessed, as others would say. They think that all I do is play around in the outdoors and then "just write about it." Mostly it's my friends who don't really know that taking a trip is only 10 percent of it; the other 90 percent, well, it's work. I sit in an office and work at my computer just like so many other members of society. Only I'm wearing flip-flops, shorts and a T-shirt, and I'm writing about some of the best places to play in the entire Beehive state.

But some days it takes awhile for that feeling of being lucky to sink in. Like my last trip to Vernal to find out what the ruckus is about with their mountain bike trail system. My luck started at 4:00 a.m. when I began the drive to Vernal and ended in a doubled-over dry-heave 12 hours later in a Jubilee grocery store parking lot in Roosevelt. Some luck. The fact is, luck had nothing to do with me, Vernal, and chirping my chips. There is nothing lucky about the way biking and the small Uintah Basin town famous for its dinosaur museums came together. But it is an interesting story.

In 1995, Rich Etchberger moved to Vernal with his wife, Lianna, to teach wildlife and natural resource classes at the Utah State University Uintah Basin Extension. They were mountain bikers. Unfortunately, there just weren't that many great places to ride. Plenty of doubletrack dirt road, sure, but no real singletrack trails to speak of in the area.

o mountain bikers, singletrack is the equivalent of untracked powder to a skier. Or a big dark slough to a fly fisherman. It's just heaven. So Rich started wondering about the possibilities of other trails. He knew there were other riders, albeit few, in Vernal, but for some reason the trails just weren't there.

Then on a trip to Flaming Gorge in '98, Etchberger happened to notice what looked like a singletrack trail near Red Fleet Reservoir. He stopped to check it out and was struck with an epiphany of sorts. Although the track was just an old cow path, he realized it could easily be groomed into a great singletrack. And so the work began.

Etchberger took his garden hoe and spent his Sundays toiling over the trail. He had nearly five miles whipped into shape when he started to make it a loop and ran right into Kevin Christopherson, another local biker, who'd been doing the same thing - building bike trail out of cow path. The two quickly joined forces, connected their respective routes and gave the inaugural route a name - Jazz Chromoly. (Christopherson's dog was named Jazz and Etchberger's daughter was named Molly.)

And so dawned a new age of biking in Vernal, only it didn't stop there. Etchberger used his Ph.D. background in wildlife ecology and a little investigative work to discover the secret to great trails.

"We learned that if we found cow tanks (manmade drinkers) then we'd also find the best trails, already in progress thanks to the cows," Etchberger says. "We've never built a trail from scratch, we just followed the patterns made by the cows and refined them." He began stepping up his efforts by searching the Internet for aerial Bureau of Land Management maps and scanning them for drinkers. He built a trail called "Can You Moo?" from cow trails and hasn't looked back since. But the story doesn't end here.

In 1995, Troy Lupcho, a former world champion BMX cyclist, was intent on opening a good bike shop - maybe in Montana or Colorado, he thought. It was his childhood dream to own a shop and he was at that point where he was ready to take the leap. While visiting his parents in Vernal, where he'd attended high school a few years earlier, he stumbled across a little place for rent. The wheels started turning and he decided to capitalize on the lack of competition (Basin Saw and Cycle wasn't exactly selling and servicing "real" mountain bikes) and the opportunity to get a trail system going.

Lupcho's shop, Altitude Cycle, soon became the place for local riders to hang out and "talk shop." With the combination of Lupcho's shop and Etchberger's trail building success, mountain biking started to pick up steam in Vernal. It was a nearly perfect situation - an untapped market, great riding conditions and terrain, and a quality shop that brought energy for the sport and the trails system they were building.

Maybe energy is the wrong word; these guys border on neurotic when it comes to building and caring for trails. They strategically place rocks, cactus and sage brush on corners to keep riders on the main trails; they consistently remind riders to "replace their divots" if they've breached the 15-inch wide swath; and they've begun teaching mountain biking classes at the USU Uintah Basin Extension to recruit riders and teach them about good trail ethics and advocacy.

And the community has responded. "We used to have only five riders on our Wednesday night rides," Etchberger says. "Now we average 20. There are a lot more people involved in mountain biking now that we have trails and a good shop, and the public knows what we're doing."

In short, Vernal has done what some other bike towns have not. They built trails because they love to ride, not to bring tourists. The folks in Vernal live to ride. This is a way of life for them and they're willing to share it - on their terms.

"We obviously want to share our trails, but we don't want to do that without educating people and making sure we don't grow out of control," Etchberger says. "The growth curve in places like Moab was not necessarily consistent with the education of good biking habits, and we don't want to get stuck in that position."

"We're really just going with whatever growth we get," Lupcho says. "There is no goal in mind. There has to be enough interest to keep a shop open, but regardless of our growth rate, we want to make sure we continue to build and care for the trails here."

Etchberger, along with Lupcho and others, has spent hundreds of hours converting cow paths and maintaining existing trails; the area now boasts almost 200 miles of buttery smooth singletrack.

The trails have names like "Squat Drop," "Can You Moo?," "Retail Sale" (in honor of all the business this trail brings Lupcho's shop), "Blood Donor," "Three Amigos" and many others. And every trail has a name for a reason. For example, Etchberger was reading a Dr. Seuss book entitled, Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? to his daughter around the same time he was busy transforming a cow track into a trail, so he ended up naming the route, "Can You Moo?"

Trails are marked with old discarded bikes and rims, and are often lined with various trinkets found during the building process: animal bones, glass bottles, bike parts. According to Etchberger, they not only help keep riders on the trail, but folks get a kick out of it as well.

One section of trail even has four elk legs, hair still intact, buried next to the route, two on each side, with the hoofs pointing skyward. Resourceful? Yes. Gruesome? Perhaps. Creative? Definitely.

Vernal still faces the challenges of a small rural Utah town though - getting a relatively new sport to take off may require some time. But the area chamber of commerce is receptive to the sport's new-found success here. The Dinotrax Mountain Bike Festival, held this past August at Flaming Gorge Reservoir, is in its third year and going strong. And you can't beat it for diversity. The mountains around Vernal, which hover at 8,000 feet, provide a noticeable reprieve from the scorching desert below. In the spring, winter and fall the lowlands provide stellar riding conditions almost year-round. It's also closer than Moab or St. George and a lot less crowded� for now anyway.

Weaving through the "Bone Yard," a section of "Can You Moo?" lined with various sun-bleached animal bones, I started thinking about the all the great trails in Utah. Mostly the ones no one knows about. Like Vernal's trails. You could drive right through town and never know they were there. So why should I be the only lucky guy who gets assignments to discover new biking areas and barf up maple bars. Well, I shouldn't. You can be lucky too, and not even have to take notes and write a story about it. I have friends who love to ride, but each winter they hang up their bikes and let the garage take over, sucking the air from the tires and dispensing a silky smooth coat of fine dust over the frame. Some of these guys can ride like the dickens all year long, but they don't.

With places like Vernal nearby, there are no excuses for hanging it up for four months or focusing exclusively on snow sports. We're all lucky there are guys like Lupcho (whose red Ford truck is plastered with his shop logo) and Etchberger (whose dedication to the sport is spelled out on his license plate, SNGLTRC) who have brought biking to various unknown havens.

I'm not going to tell you where to ride. You'll have to find out for yourself. Call Altitude Cycle or stop by and pick up one of their self-published trail guides.

If you build it, they will come. Maybe that's the new tag line for Vernal. I know I'll be going back for more. Maybe next time I'll be luckier, I'll actually finish the days' ride with my lunch intact.

If you go: Contact Altitude Cycle for trail and lodging information. Visit their web site at www.altitudecycle.com or call them at (877) 781-2460 or (435) 781-2595.