National Geographic UK - 03.2020

ARCHES

NATIONAL PARK

COLORADO

NAT. MON.

McINNIS CANYONS

NATIONAL CONSERVATION

AREA

Cisco

Fruita

Loma

Moab

Grand

Junction

LA SAL

MOUNTAINS

Po

rc

up

in

e (^) R
im
DOME
PLATEAU
Piñon Mesa
Fi
sh
er
M
es
a
Mt. Peale
12,720 ft
3,877 m
Trail
high point
8,612 ft
2,625 m
KOKOPELLI’S
TRAIL
UTAH
COLORADO
Colorado
E. Salt Cr.
191
191
70
70
128
COLORADO
UTAH
KOKOPELLI’S
TRAIL
10 km
10 mi
N
NGM MAPS
TRAVEL | CLOSER LOOK
Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monuments,
both southwest of the Kokopelli. Those disputes,
which pit preservation against development and
extraction, are a microcosm of a larger struggle.
According to a 2019 study in the journal Science,
protected lands are increasingly in jeopardy world-
wide, with 90 percent of reductions to public lands
in the United States made since 2000.
“Vast expanses of undeveloped tracts of public
lands like the Kokopelli are less and less common
in the West,” says Kurt Refsnider, executive director
of the cycling advocacy group Bikepacking Roots.
(Refsnider also holds the fastest known time for
biking the Kokopelli: 11 hours and 52 minutes.) “The
first step in preserving such lands is getting people
out using them and engaged.”
So when you get to ride across more than a hun-
dred miles of unblemished land these days, it’s not
only a rare experience; it’s also a ballot cast for land
conservation. I got to do just that when I pedaled the
Kokopelli in early November with my brother-in-law,
Trevor Webb.
We rolled out of the Colorado border town of
Fruita on a bracing Friday morning, alone on the
rock benches above the Colorado River. Strictly
speaking, the Kokopelli isn’t just one trail but a
stitched-together tapestry of single-track, back-
country roads and even a bit of pavement that very
roughly follows the river between Loma, Colorado,
and Moab, Utah. After crossing Salt Creek a couple
of hours into our ride, we cruised through a sea of
grasslands turned flaxen with the gathering autumn
and passed outcrops that were like battleships of
sandstone. Once we’d turned south, we rode through
great basins where towers of rock balanced like out-
size skeleton keys sunk in the sand. Over our entire
three-day trip, we’d see only three 4x4s and a half
dozen cyclists. Considering the throngs that visit the
nearby parks and monuments (in 2018, more than a
third of a million people entered Colorado National
Monument while 2.4 million went to Arches and
Canyonlands combined), the trail’s solitude makes
its vistas feel all the more exclusive.
The Kokopelli has always been about big ideas.
When the concept of the trail was hatched in the
late ’80s, mountain biking was little more than a few
eccentric cyclists modifying street bikes for off-road
use. “It was taking off in Crested Butte and in Moab,
and I just thought that if we could figure out a trail
to link those two places through Grand Junction,
maybe we’d have something positive instead of just
oil shale,” says Timms Fowler, whom Muhr describes
as the visionary for the trail.
Though the project never grew beyond the initial
Loma-to-Moab segment, it laid the groundwork for
subsequent trails and systems that have turned the
region into a riding hotbed, one of the first places to
capitalize on the sport. Today the Kokopelli seems
tailor-made for one of the industry’s growing trends:
bikepacking, in which cyclists ride with all their gear
on multiday adventures. “I don’t think they’d have
anything to bikepack these days if we hadn’t started
putting in trails like the Kokopelli,” says Muhr. “It
was the first of its kind.” j
Aaron Gulley is a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based journalist who
has written for two decades on cycling, travel, sports, and fitness.