Ride Report : American Fork Canyon Single track - 6/25/2009

Thursday evening, Al and myself went up AF Canyon again to ride the trails. We didn't get anyone else to come with us.
We went up to Tibble Fork parking lot. As we were unloading our bikes and gearing up, we could see the rain approaching up the canyon. By the time I was getting my helmet on, the rain was coming down. We thought about simply riding up the road, taking the jeep trail to Forest Lake. But we decided to take single track trail 41 up to 157. As the rain fell, we drove down the road, crossed the dam, and climbed up trail 41. There are several videos I posted on VHoldR.com. (Video1, Video2, Video3, Video4, Video5, Video6, Video7, Video8). We climbed up the trail, and immediately ran into bikers coming down, and a couple dirt bikers undecided which direction they were headed. We passed them, and continued climbing up trail 41. At one point, I got mired in a bog, having picked the wrong line to get thru it. After spending some energy and frustration here, we continued on. Not long after, we ran into 2 other riders. We hung with them all the way thru trail 41, helping each other thru quite a few muddy obstacles. Once we reached trail 157, it seemed like we had spent way too much time on trail 41, and were worried about the time left before dark, and our ability to complete the circuit. Our worries were unfounded, as the rest of the loop was done quickly. We climbed up trail 157 until it intersected with trail 40. This was a rather quick section, that showed off a beautiful view of both sides of the mountain crest we were traversing. Once we crossed trail 40, we headed down. Close to the top of this trail, we encountered some quads that were on some trail that seemed to be closed. Later, we encountered some trail portions that seemed to have been widened, and I even went down a newly dug road of off the single track. It was in this area that we saw an incredible amount of trees that were being harvested. Stumps and logs were laying all around us. I'm not sure what was going on in this area, or if it was legal. It had me worried. We encountered some horesman coming up this trail, and despite my best intentions, I still startled the horse with my brightly colored, quick moving dirtbike, even in the off position. The front tire slipped and skidded down a few inches, startling the hose. Sorry horsey! We continued on down trail 40, which is quite a rocky narrow trail. I've come up this trail before, and it is quite difficult. Going down is differently difficult. We made it thru more muddy areas, thru chutes of dirt with rocks scattered about randomly, and the occasional large tree root providing extra added flavor. We soon started encountering small stream crossings. These watery obstacles are small at the beginning, and only fool you into a false sense of security; the big water crossing is yet to come. Unfortunately, we didn't get this portion of the trip recorded on video. I musta forgotten to turn it back on. My Bad. The river feeding into Tibble Fork is rather large, and wide, at lease compared to the other river crossings we had just gone thru. I almost made it all the way thru the river, but didnt dump in, which is always in the back of my mind. Ad I climbed out of the river, and up the last part of the trail, i slid off to the right of the railroad ties. As Al passed me, he had to point out the incorrectness of my line choice. At this point in the ride, i was off the trail, wet almost everywhere, and very satisfied that we had a great time. As we were loading up, we saw 6 other groups of riders loading up from their rides as well. We spoke with a few of them, and it seemed that everyone had had a great time riding the amazing trails of AF canyon.