Grand Junction, CO to Moab, UT — 122.5 mi, 4092 ft (actually 87.9 mi, 2257 ft)
I try to imagine the sweat on my skin is the glaze of a Krispy Kreme donut. That’s the only way to get through times like these. Only the occasional gust of wind provides some unsatisfactory relief in this land of nothing taller than a toddler. The hair on my arms and legs, usually black, have been bleached blonde by the sun, offering an unfamiliar contrast exaggerated by my skin also being a shade darker than usual.
My water, as it dripped on my lips from my “insulated” squeeze bottle, was indistinguishable from the hot murky liquid you leave in the pot after boiling a hot dog.
Tatiana [today’s driver] calls.
I reach in my jersey’s back pocket and scramble for my phone to answer before the call goes to voicemail and the one bar of cell service God endowed me with inevitably fades away.
“Hey Drew, there’s no ice at all of the 5 gas stations within 30 miles, and I will have to go back to Grand Junction….
I can barely hear her over the sound of the wind in my face.
…I’ll meet you in…”
She cuts out.
I’m out of water. It’s over 100 degrees. The lightly colored packed dirt reflects the sun’s rays back up, cooking me from both sides.
Off in the distance, Nate and I see a bridge that gets closer and closer over a period of time that felt like an hour but was probably closer to 15 minutes. We pass by something that looks like a well. I get off my bike and turn the handle– nothing happens. I realize I probably shouldn’t be messing with random plumbing on the side of the road and decide to keep pedaling without the water. We get to the bridge– the first shade we’ve encountered today since the cliffs of the Colorado National Monument 60 miles ago… and we’re only halfway done?
How did we get here?
The rolling hills faded away over time revealing an expanse which felt like a static portrait. I pedaled, nothing got closer. Occasional cameos from different wildlife told me that I was getting further from the place where people should be. We saw a bald eagle and sang him his favorite song (The Star Spangled Banner).
I think he liked it.
Upon reaching the Utah sign, we found a gap in the barbed wire fence that separated our trail from the interstate to which the sign belonged. We all squeezed into through the gap to take a picture with the sign. Meanwhile, Tatiana called us in distress about the car potentially flipping over on the uneven bike trail leading up to the sign. I don’t think anyone on the team, including Tatiana, knows why she decided to use the uneven bike path instead of staying on the highway where the sign was. Perhaps she wanted to push the limits of our rental Toyota Sienna with 3 inches of ground clearance could do. That way, we could have a reference point of what we could do with it in the future, when duty calls. The rest of the team served as counsel over the phone as she went backwards up the path and found her way back to the interstate where she rendezvoused with us at the Utah sign.
We took the photo. In the background, the sign read “Welcome to Utah.” Everyone smiled, and more.
The flow of traffic on the interstate seemed to somewhat fade away as a family of three get out of a car to take the same picture as us. The family, composed of an infant, a middle aged woman, and an elderly woman are discussing a car accident that they witnessed prior to arriving at the sign. We took photos for them, then we squeezed back through the barbed wire fence to access the trail that we were on to avoid proximity to interstate traffic.
We resume the trail, which had a lot of up and downs across various terrain types, including sand. It intersected a gravel road which served the purpose of getting us in the general direction of Moab while avoiding interstate traffic. We look to the right and saw a cloud of dust approaching with some large vehicles visible in the foreground. The majority of the team preferred to wait out the passing vehicles and dust. However, I decided to turn anyways, and Nate followed shortly after upon realizing that there were hundreds of cars not passing anytime soon. At first, we had the hopes that we could bike faster than them, as they were going quite slow, however, we soon found ourselves engulfed in a cloud of dust birthed by the passing cars. We covered our mouths and noses with one hand and steered with the other as cars passed one-by-one for over half an hour. I assume this was a detour to avoid the car wreck which had been mentioned by the woman who asked us to take her picture. We came out here to avoid the interstate, but the interstate came to us.
I’m not aware of how the rest of the team decided to handle the traffic, however, after turning off of the gravel road, it was down to just Nate and I. We turned onto another detour which took off in a random direction into the desert. It added about 4 or 5 miles to the route, a tradeoff I feel is worth avoiding being near cars.
Statistically speaking, the most likely thing to kill us on this trip actually isn’t dogs or lightning. It’s drivers. Some drivers are bad intentionally. There have been several occasions of pickup truck drivers pulling up next to us, slowing down, and actively trying to run us off the road. I will never understand this behaviour. Like, I get that having to make the conscious decision to move left to pass a group of cyclists is a little annoying, and you feel the need to have some kind of revenge. But I promise you, Mr. Pickup Truck Driver, your life is not harder than mine. You are in an air-conditioned box pressing down a gas pedal; I am pedaling up this hill in 100 degree heat without the help of a V8 engine like a big boy.
But, even scarier than people who do see us and decide to be mean are the people that don’t see us at all– the unintentionally bad drivers. And that’s why I’ve found myself in the middle of this desert, with Nate.
After trudging through a miserable 28 mile stretch in 100 degree heat, we set up a rest stop under a bridge and waited for Tatiana to get there. She arrived after ~20 minutes around the same time as the rest of the group, who had routed themselves onto the interstate💀shoulder to avoid the extra mileage. We camped out there for almost 45 minutes enjoying the shade and recovering from mild heat exhaustion.
The next stretch was mostly downhill as we descended into the canyon through which the Colorado River flows. The downhill, commanding much less exertion than the previous leg, made the heat a little bit more manageable. At our second-to-last rest stop, we decided to swim in the river as we waited out the peak afternoon heat. This would require that we bike in the dark, however, the road was very low traffic, so we decided it was a worthy tradeoff.
Swimming in the Colorado river was kind of tricky. Sitting still was hard because the water has a pretty strong flow and the riverbed is mostly loose rocks. Some of us resorted to laying on our floaty tied to a boulder (that they made me move into the river).
Some of us decided to walk upstream and just float back down. Tatiana was doing her own thing where she grabbed onto a rock and just sat there floating on her belly; it looked really funny.
By the time the sun decided to obscure itself behind the canyon walls, we were ready to start rolling again, prompted partially by impending darkness, but more so by the suspicious clouds behind us. The next 4 miles where very out of the ordinary. Aarushi was setting a crazy 20 mph pace as we all ripped the next couple miles, biking in a beautiful formation that resembled a 6-count half carton of eggs.
But, as the dark clouds devoured the sky in front of us, and the winds decided that they did not want MIT Spokes on the road, we were forced to turn back to shelter in a chaotic frenzy intensified by the sudden-onset darkness.
Nunu handed out tasks as we repacked the van in a way to accommodate 7 passengers, sort of.
We decided we would lock up our bikes at this campground and finish our ride tomorrow, since it would be a rest day. After a quick food run at the Moab Wendy’s, we all went to sleep in anticipation of getting up extra early. This plan, of course, hinged on someone being willing to drive us back to the spot where we left our bikes. So we bribed Tatiana with by offering to do some of her chores, and she reluctantly agreed to sacrifice sleep on our behalf.
…to be continued.
– Drew
MIT Spokes 2026 
Leave a comment