Days that don't have a lot of pictures mean one thing -- really hard riding. I'm pretty beat up from a tough afternoon.
We left Ruby's and backtracked to Hatch along the bike path in Dixie National Forest, this time mercifully downhill.
Saw a squad of bike tourists going the other way. Wonder if they would get to cash in on their potential energy investment like we were able to do.
After reaching Hatch, we tackled the first gravel stretch of this tour. 16 mi of bone rattling steep climbs. I felt them on my 42mm tires; must have been even worse for Matt and Gabe on skinnier tires.
The landscape was dry but not barren, and we were surrounded by rolling pastures and the occasional cow in our path.
The gravel put us way off pace, and we hit a wall in the afternoon between more on-road climbing and a fierce headwind.
I had my head down must of the time here, just doing my best to ascend the ever rising road to Cedar Breaks National Monument, which a fellow camper at Zion said was gorgeous.
We did see that the trees had started turning color:
As we had planned, we picked out a spot on the side of the road to do "dispersed camping," which is permitted in Utah in some national forest land.
So here we are, surrounding our fire built of hand chopped fallen branches. We have not wild camped like this since the first day of our first tour.
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