Manhattan to Moab or City Blocks to Slickrocks

Ever since I first laid knobbie onto Slickrock Moab has been my favorite place to ride but the trouble is I live in Manhattan. All my riding buddies live east of the Mississippi too. For ages I've wanted to pull together an epic Moab adventure for my friends in Gotham and finally, this year, right now, it's happening. From an email invitation to 32 friends we've gotten down to 9 hardy souls willing to take a week off and hit the trail.

This ride report will be different than my others and hopefully just different as we have a good crew of tech savvy riders who can all post and shoot so I'm hoping that this will be a multifaceted multimedia report with everyone chiming in. Hopefully Flanny will spread a little of his magic as well. Many have never ridden "the west" and experience varies but we're all pretty decent riders. It's all small bikes - 250's to 450's.

Today we loaded 8 motorcycles into my pickup and Christian's trailer. Tom is driving them west one week early. Here's a quick time lapse of our load up:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/16131858?byline=0" width="400" height="265" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/16131858">Moab Loading</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user2122740">Gregor Halenda</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

Here's your cast:

Gregor - facilitator, organizer, instigator
Flanny - GPS giant and media tycoon from the great white north
Tom - mover, shaker and young gun
Gino - Italian stallion and comic relief
James - Enduro nutter and all around rider
Chris - fabrication phenom and comeback kid
John - mysterious secret agent man
Christian - super fast east coast enduro and slickrock virgin
Clipper - former Dirt Bike editor and poetic wordsmith

We span 30+ years but we share a desire for one glorious week of riding in the west. Our bikes are somewhere in Ohio at the moment and we all fly in to Grand Junction where we will kick this thing off for real.

Buckle up your helmets!

Gregor

This should be good Ride safe and have fun

can't wait for some of those great photos. Only been to Moab once, and dying to get back out there.

Was recently in Max's BMW and saw some of your work hanging up! Recognized it from your Trans Lab adventure.

Yee-haw...


Totally stoked that my bike is riding in the back of the truck, and not in the bike-grinder-mixer-moulinex you call a trailer...

James checking in......

I can't wait!! This week is going to draggggg...........
Here are two mobile pics from the morning of the load

Elevator full of bikes


Right before Tom departs, double checking the trailer

Just a few dirt bikes going down the elevator.




A Cosentino KTM Sandwich on Husaberg bread.




Our intrepid long-haul truck driver.

Hah! Ya beat me to it.

You just proved the iphone 4 takes better pics than the 3gs

This oughta be good...

--mark

Thanks for posting those shots guys - I'm counting on everyone's participation to make this thread interesting. Because 9 guys from the east coast riding dirt bikes in Moab won't be

So as we have been planning this trip some guys bailed and some wavered and honestly I figured we'd end up with about 4-5 so to get 9 was a big surprise. When I saw 7 bikes in the elevator it finally hit me how big our group is - huge. Thankfully Flanny has been hard at work collecting GPS routes.

Our plan right now is to ride Book Cliffs outside of Grand Junction this coming Saturday as a shake down/warm up. Everyone gets in at different times with James and Christian getting in first (hopefully after Tom) on Friday night. They aren't staying on for the full week so are eager to ride every minute. Sunday is Rabbit Valley which should be a good full day warm up then off to Moab for trick or treating.

One of the issues we'll have is that in order to get 5 bikes in the trailer we had to take off the front wheels - we're hoping that once we're in Moab there will be little need for the trailer.

Now let's just hope that the bikes make it to Colorado!

Gregor

<iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="853" height="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-N5eNtMipBM?hd=1" frameborder="0"></iframe>

mcc66
Michael

Ok everyone, so I have made it to Colorado. I learned along the way that when I have a mission to complete I don't like to rest until that mission is completed. I treated getting out there much like a trucker haha. I only stopped to sleep or get food and when I stopped to sleep, I slept right off the highway ready to get up and start driving again.

On the way out I saw a lot of corn fields. I bought a gas can from Wal-mart that had a hole in it. I found out it had a hole in it when I started to fill it up. Later I returned a gas can to Wal-mart and got a new one.

I ended up driving a lot at night because I felt like I never did enough miles during the day.

When I made it to Colorado I was lucky enough to meet up with my Uncle John who had a friend named Gary that let me leave the bikes at his place. I had to take the bikes out of the bed of the truck and ditch the trailer because the truck started making funny noises on the way down so I wanted to drop it off at a garage and get it checked out.

So far Colorado has been great, I saw some elk.

Yee-Haw - Righjt on Tom! Good to know you're there already. That's Fan-F-in-Tastic!

Great first post

do us proud!

Gregor, whatcha packin' to catch photons? Same rig as the trans-lab or even more stripped down?