Biking the Red Rocks of Moab and a Little Historical Background on the City

From Montrose, in Colorado, we drove to the beautiful city in eastern Utah known as Moab. It’s famous for it’s enormous formations of red rocks and people come from all over the world to go ATVing, biking, and exploring. Moab is very close to the Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and has ancient history as seen by Indian rock art and dinosaur tracks.

Moab had it’s first white settlers in the mid 1800’s – a group of Mormon missionaries came to influence the Ute Indians who were settled there. However, some fights ensued and the Mormons retreated to other villages further north in Utah. Several decades later, permanent white settlers returned to Moab. One of these settlers was a man named William Pierce who gave Moab it’s name after “the land beyond the Jordan” in the Bible. Apparently, many people didn’t like this name and it’s significance, so they tried (and failed) to change it to Vina (source: The Founding and Naming of Moab).

Beyond the history of the Indians, there is also evidence of dinosaurs who once roamed in this area. A nice couple came by in an ATV one day and told us about a place that was sectioned off to preserve the dinosaur tracks in that area. It was a pretty amazing experience.

Although we loved the history in this area, the biggest highlight of our time in Moab was our crazy biking experiences. The last time we visited Moab was in January of 2017 and it was freezing (see pictures of us in Arches National Park in this post) and we didn’t think much of the place at the time. However, in warmer weather, Moab is a great place to be. We went biking for hours and miles at a time through all of the incredible rock formations. The biking trails are set up similar to how ski resorts are set up because the level of difficulty is categorized according to colors with green being the easiest, then blue, and then black. Each of us learned a lot about biking in general and we would love to go back to Moab to ride again sometime.

We stayed in the Klondike Bluffs area for about 2 weeks and then drove to the other side of Moab where we camped in a BLM designated area for another 2 weeks. Other than historical sites and biking adventures, we dealt with noisy neighbors, saw and killed a tarantula, took several trips to the library, got lost in Canyonlands National Park, and hiked from our spot in Klondike Bluffs to Arches National Park.

In our next post, we will find a tiny village tucked away inside of…you’ll have to find out where! Stay tuned!

Klondike Bluffs

Rating:

5 out of 5 stars

Comments:

The road to our spot was long and bumpy, but we had a lot of privacy and most people kept to themselves. The internet was OK. One day, we were forced to drive to the library in town because our connection was so bad. Our location and the beauty of the area made up for it, though.

Cell Service:

– Google Fi (combination of US cellar, T-mobile, and Sprint): 4 bars of LTE

– Verizon: 2-3 LTE bars (with a booster)

Weather:

– High was in 70’s

– Low was in the 30’s

Time of Year:

Middle of October

Recommended Places to See & Things to do:

– There are several dinosaur stomping grounds that you can visit.

– Obviously, go biking – it’s Moab!

BLM location