Temple Quarry Trail is Surprisingly Fun

Last night I finally rode the famous Temple Quarry Trail, which starts at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon and follows the "river" up the canyon for 4 miles.  It's mostly a wide packed gravel road but has a few bursts of rocky sections that can be taxing on the way up, and one section of narrow windy track through some boulders.  The uphill portion is a good workout but not so vigorous as something like Vomit Hill in Big Cottonwood Canyon.  The downhill portion is an unmitigated glory ride, the wide track makes for a very forgiving speed path, the periodic erosion breaks make for excellent jumps (which at your downhill enhanced speed become even more fun), and the rocky sections (if you have a suspended bike) are nothing more than rumble strips at that speed.  Excepting for taking care not to frighten (or collide with) upward coming trail users and downward going hikers, you can almost scream down the entire descent with very little braking, my top speed ended up being 35 mph.  Which might not sound like a lot to you roadies out there, but is pretty good for a rocky downhill, I caught up to several bikers also going down, but the trail is not quite wide enough to pass at speed, so I stopped and let them get far ahead again, then blazed away.

Lake Powell for Fitness!

This is the only vacation I go on where I come back all beat up and sore, but still love it. It even motivates me to stay in shape so I don't get beat up as bad next year, or at least not any worse.

Lake Powell needs Some Help!

We spent a week down there and the water is rising about 6 inches/day, so it came up 3 feet while we were there. That sounds like a lot, considering how big the lake is. But the lake level was only a few feet higher than this time last year after about a 60 foot gain over all of last spring/early summer. In other words, after a banner runoff year like 2005, the amount of water gained was barely enough to keep the lake from losing ground over the whole cycle. The outflow of the dam is obviously incorrectly defined. I know there are plenty of ignorant people who believe that we should just drain Lake Powell and return Glen canyon back to it's original beauty and grandure. I have yet to hear a compelling argument as to why that is a good idea. 1) The beauty and grandure that once were are gone, it would be a thousand years before the canyon looked like anything but a dried up lake carcass. 2) The humanities interests (indian ruins) are in fact ruined, there is no longer any human interest, or anything new we can learn from them that we have not already learned from the other ruins in the area. 3) Without the Lake and its accompanying dam, how would we control the floods and ebbs of the river? Didn't I just say that the entire lake was rising 6 inches per day!? Do you have any idea what that much water would look like in a river bed? We are talking about a broken Teton Dam every day for 3 months in a row, EVERY YEAR. 4) Without the flood controls of Glen Canyon dam, what would happen to Lake Havasu and Lake Mead? Do you think they would be able to handle the extra pressure? Not likely. 5) Without the storage of water during runoff and redistribution during the summer drought, where would all the communities and farms of the region which currently depend on this system get their water? 6) And the hydro-electric power? The environmentalist dope heads who are pressing for the draining of the lake, are the same daffy freakshows that block the construction of new power plants of ANY kind, coal plants pollute too much (and I actually agree with that), nuclear plants are...well, the waste problem (not nearly as serious as everyone thinks, compared to other waste problems), wind farms are too noisy, solar farms are too bright, bio-waste conversion plants are too stinky, squirrels in cages shed too much fur into the environment, and so on. Hydro-electric power is THE CLEANEST reliable POWER SOURCE we know of PERIOD, and they want to shut one down? Come on people, put down the joint and actually think it through, you know there is a reason they call it DOPE!