San Rafael Swell MTB Trip – Day 2 – Joel and Alison’s Excellent Adventures

Day Two dawned with the promise of pretty significant winds. Not to worry – we were riding over 16 miles downhill through Red’s Canyon? Wrong – it is always demoralizing to be riding downhill into a headwind as you can’t really even stop pedaling. Be that as it may, we had the opportunity to ride past Family Butte and down to Hondoo Arch and Muddy Creek Campground with not too much effort. We had anticipated that this would be our lunch spot and then would climb back up to McKay Flats to our campsite. Based on the increasing winds, our guides Rachel and Zoey made the decision to camp here in some semblance of a wind break. Great decision in the end! To add some adventure to the day we took a 2 hr. hike up and back through the Upper Muddy Creek Gorge which included a total of 10 water crossings!

Dan jumped right in to the kitchen duties as we broke camp after breakfast of eggs, hash browns and blueberry muffins. Plus copious amounts of coffee!

Joel with Family Butte in the background.

Although you could see for many miles, the ominous clouds caught our attention!

You can barely see the Hondoo Arch above our guide, Zoey’s head on the right.

Tom, along as visiting astronomer, helping serve our pineapple treat for lunch.

One of the 10 creek crossings on our hike. Being the shortest, I think I got the wettest! Luckily it was not too deep right now as there is limited snow runoff from the mountains.

Something sort of interesting we saw on our hike were these giant piles of horse poop. Looking it up later I found out these are called “Stud Piles” and are used by the wild stallions in the area to mark their territory. The piles get big as the stallions apparently try to outpoop each other.

Once back at camp we set up the tents and tried to add a few windblocks. The sand that was blowing around was so fine that it came through the mesh in the tents and everything was covered in an instant. The wind seemed to die down a bit so Dan and Beatrice set out searching for downed wood for a fire. It was nice to have the fire to take a bit of the chill off.