IN THE BOTTOM HALF OF UTAH, RISING FROM A JIGSAW OF
CAYENNE-HUED SANDSTONE BLUFFS, LIES A LAND THAT IS AS
CONTENTIOUS AS IT IS AN INDELIBLE PART OF THE AMERICAN IDENTITY.
Few landscapes evoke the promise, self-reliance, and hardship of the
American frontier as immediately as this region’s red rock buttes and
canyons. Some of these places—Canyonlands, Arches, Bryce, Zion—are
already mythic, immortalized by the likes of John Wesley Powell, Wal-
lace Stegner, and, most famously, Edward Abbey. Then there’s Bears Ears
National Monument, a Delaware-size swath of wilderness that has become
an infamous f lashpoint over resource management, conservation, and the
fate of public lands. It’s the sort of country you can pedal through all day for
days on end, as I did this past October, where you hardly see other people,
and the views at almost every turn—soaring vermilion buttes, watercolor
badlands, and shaggy ponderosa—make you exclaim out loud.
“It’s amazing, right?,” says Kurt Refsnider, as we pedal from Green River
to Moab. Refsnider is one of the winningest endurance mountain bike racers
in the country, as well as a retired professor of geology. Where I see dusty
yellow hummocks before a backdrop of periwinkle cliffs, he sees time and
history and the insignificance of humans within it. He explains that these
shale deposits date to the late Cretaceous period and slot in, stratigraphi-
cally speaking, between the Dakota and Mesaverde formations.
Refsnider’s passion for the landscape, combined with his love of the bike,
is the reason we’re here. In 2017, he and his close friend and Pivot Cycles
teammate, Kaitlyn Boyle, founded a not-for-profit called Bikepacking Roots.
The organization was born of the pair’s shared interests: Not only do they
both excel at self-support endurance mountain bike racing, but, in a previ-
ous life, they conceived and taught bikepacking geology classes together
at Prescott College in Arizona. Dedicated to increasing awareness of and
access for bikepacking, as well as educating cyclists about conservation
issues affecting them, Bikepacking Roots has steadily crafted and released
a small portfolio of routes aimed at helping riders get out on public lands.
In April, the organization unveiled its f lagship achievement, the 2,700-
mile Wild West Route, a mostly dirt-road cycling course that bisects the
United States from the Canadian border just outside of Eureka, Montana,
to the Mexican border near Sierra Vista, Arizona. Passing through four
states, 18 national forests, six national parks and monuments, four areas
designated as Bureau of Land Management (BLM) national conservation
lands, and two tribal parks, some 70 percent of the riding sits on public
lands. “I know how transformative a ride like this can be, and I also believe
that helping people have such an experience on public lands is one of the
best ways to get them invested in these resources,” Kurt says. “The WWR
is a giant way to showcase public lands and help keep wild places wild.”
To date, only a handful of people have pedaled the entire Wild West
Route, which Bikepacking Roots estimates takes 40 days or more. But the
course is divided into nine 300-ish-mile segments. Kurt knows of some 100
riders who have pedaled at least one of these. “These big iconic adventures
are the things that really inspire people,” he says. “But even spending just
a week on the Wild West Route feels more challenging and rewarding than
your typical one-week bike trip to some mountain town.”
To that end, Bikepacking Roots is also working on connectors to the
3,084-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which bisects the U.S. far-ther to the east, as well as side spur loops. One of these is the forthcoming
Bears Ears Alternate, set to open in time for the 2020 spring riding season.
It will diverge from the main route smack dab in the center of Utah and
rejoin it on the west f lank of the Henry Mountains, after passing through
Moab and the hotly contested Bears Ears National Monument to its south.
The story of Bears Ears is short but tumultuous. Following the failure of
an almost four-year effort by conservative Utah congressman Rob Bishop
to facilitate a compromise that would have preserved parts of the land in
question, President Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument
on December 28, 2016. Environmentalists and Native American tribes,
who initiated the idea for Bears Ears, hailed the action, while conserva-
tive politicians and mining industry execs decried it as overreach. After
President Donald Trump took office, he slashed the size of Bears Ears by
84 percent on December 4, 2017. The decision came after, and in spite of, a
public comment period that saw more than 685,000 responses, 98 percent
of which were in favor of preserving it.
Within days of Trump’s action, a host of conservation groups and Native
American tribes sued the U.S. government on grounds that the Antiqui-
ties Act of 1906 gives the president the right to create monuments but not
modify existing ones. The litigation is ongoing, leaving the size and fate of
Bears Ears up in the air. (Similar lawsuits are pending over Utah’s Grand
Staircase Escalante National Monument, which Trump cut nearly in half.)
That hasn’t stopped the Trump Administration from printing maps with
the new boundaries and opening the rescinded land to new mining claims.
It can feel almost impossible to grasp what’s at stake in debates such
as the one over Bears Ears. These policy decisions are, for most of us,
theoretical arguments over places on the map that we may never visit. So
when I learned of Bikepacking Roots’ Bears Ears Alternate, I persuaded
Kurt and Kaitlyn to join me on a tour. Not only would the trip serve as a
sampling of the country’s newest bikepacking epic, but, for once, I would
get to see firsthand the canyons and junipers and dusty mountains and
disputed wilderness over which the fight is raging.A
s murky tentacles of departing storm clouds wind their way east,
we meet on a crisp October Friday morning in Green River, Utah, a
tidy but meager stop on Interstate 70. With only four days to spare,
riding the entire Bears Ears Alternate isn’t an option. Instead, we’ve
settled on a 270-mile southbound stretch out of Green River that will
take in all of Bears Ears and then some—plus offer easy shuttling. From
the highway, we’ll cross badlands eastward to Moab, the de facto capital
of Utah mountain biking, skirt the fringe of Canyonlands National Park
as we head south through red rock country and Indian Creek, climb above
10,000 feet over the little-known Abajo Mountains, and finally turn west to
descend back to the northernmost finger of Lake Powell, in Glen Canyon
National Recreation Area. Under the original Bears Ears designation, 200
miles of our route would be afforded National Monument protection; given68 BICYCLING.COM • ISSUE 1 | 2020