In their quest to continue expanding bike trails for forever and ever, Moab has added new trails to the Klondike Bluffs area. Along with a new trailhead, the “North Klondike” trails have greatly expanded the area of trails northeast of Moab, Utah.
The original Klondike Bluffs trail head and trails are still accessible, but for an even closer to the interstate option, on your way out of or into town, you can’t beat the North Klondike area. Located off of Hwy 191 between mile markers 149 and 148, trails like “Mega Steps,” “Dino Flow,” and “Alaska” provide riders with a variety of rock and dirt singletrack riding.
We’d wanted to check out this area at the end of October when we visited, but the weather gods were against it. Recently, though, we drove the 1.5 hours back to Moab for another weekend of slickrock riding. After once again riding the Mag 7 trails on Saturday, we planned to check out the North Klondike area on our way home on Sunday.
The main trailhead is about 2 miles off the highway. Follow the signs to “Dino Tracks” and then to “N. Klondike Bluffs” and you’ll find yourself in a dirt parking area with a map and a few trailheads. Anything with the clearance of a Subaru Outback or better will be fine driving this road.
The variety of trails out here makes it possible to create a ride route of anywhere from 6 to probably 30 miles. A great short ride (about 6 miles) would be to ride up Mega Steps and down Alaska (or vice versa). Both involve a lot of entertaining rock riding!
We were interested in something longer, so we headed up Mega Steps and then turned right onto Baby Steps. Mega Steps will start out with some fairly intense rock climbing, but it mellows out after a bit. Baby Steps is part dirt road, part singletrack/rock (depending on where you turn. The dirt road portion is indicated with a dotted line). Even the few doubletrack parts of Baby Steps that we rode were fun. There were some sections of technical rock riding and there were times when we could really pick up some speed.
Looking for more rock, we turned off onto a trail called Little Salty and followed that to UFO. Many of the trails out here reminded me of Gooseberry Mesa: lots of rock obstacles upon rock obstacles and areas of up, down, around, and over rock. This is the reason we love coming to Moab: the riding is just so different from what we have in Grand Junction, just a short hour and a half away! While there are sections of dirt, the rock is what makes it so unique. Every time I encountered an obstacle and thought, “there’s no way,” the grippy rock helped me prove myself wrong.
From UFO we found Baby Steps singletrack, a 1.3-mile loop of really entertaining singletrack and rock. From riding under a giant flat slab to cleaning more technical rock obstacles, we found a lot to enjoy on that one!
Eventually, and with a few wrong turns (though most of the area is signed really well), we found ourselves on Dino Flow, a rolling, intermediate singletrack trail that took us back to the trailhead.
By the time we were finished we’d ridden 14 miles and spent about 3 hours out on the trails. In that time we saw maybe 10 people. While I don’t think the North Klondike area will offer much for beginning riders, there are other areas for that, like the Klonzo trails off of Willow Springs road. But if you’re looking for a new area to explore with intermediate to advanced rock riding and great views, the North Klondike area is one to put on the list!
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Dec 31, 2014