Bike riding the Burr Trail

At breakfast we asked the B&B owner, host, and cook for a recommendation for a road bike ride. After some thought, he recommended the paved, canyon portion of the Burr Trail. This road runs from Boulder east to Notom-Bullfrog road. The eastern end is dirt with quite a few switchbacks, but clearly we wouldn’t go that far. This sounded good to us, so we packed up the bikes and headed to Boulder.

As the photos show, Escalante is a really small town, and the best storefronts on main street are pretty depressing. I suspect tourism is the major business.

We parked the car at a wide spot in the road a few miles east of Boulder, started our ride over rolling terrain, and really enjoyed the views. After 3 or 4 miles we dropped precipitously into a canyon (and paid dearly for it on the climb out) and then lazily rode a gentle uphill climb, enjoying the canyon walls and cliffs. We stopped to explore a short slot canyon on our way back.

After loading the bikes in the truck, we hiked for a bit along Deer Creek, but there didn’t seem to be anything of interest the direction we went. I then thought of doing a 3 mile hike into a narrow slot canyon near the end of the Burr Trail, but when we arrived at the beginning of the dirt road and I looked at the time, I realized we used up all our time and we needed to return to Escalante.

Links
—The Burr Trail 2009 photo gallery