How To ALMOST Bike The Entire Kokopelli Trail
Plus, how to make the transition to my new Patreon
The Third Thing Update:
If you’re not interested in this new project, you can scroll down to the video and the story below — but be warned, you’re missing out!
In a truly astounding commitment to better managing my time, I am still on track to launch The Third Thing next Tuesday, October 31. The website is nearly finished, the new email platform is freshly built out, and most exciting (to me at least) my new Patreon account has launched and is ready for subscribers!
Here’s a reminder of how this transition from The Hag to The Third Thing will go:
The Third Thing will be its own website, which will host two monthly stories (sometimes written, sometimes video, sometimes audio) that come out every other Tuesday. There will also be a weekly newsletter that comes out every Thursday. Both the stories on the website and the newsletter will ALWAYS be free and available to everyone and anyone.
To support this creative project, I’ve launched a Patreon account that allows you to pay either $3/month or $5/month and both tiers give you access to one bonus update post a month. I promise these monthly Patreon posts will be fantastic to read, but more importantly, your support through Patreon gifts me financial support to be creative and tell stories in a culture that increasingly devalues these things.
If you contribute MONTHLY to this Substack: You will need to cancel your subscription to The Hag (here’s a walkthrough on how to do that) and re-subscribe over on Patreon to continue supporting me. I will be closing down The Hag in the next six months, so your payments will automatically be canceled at that time if you forget.
If you contribute ANNUALLY to this Substack: You don’t need to do anything. The Hag will close down before your subscription renews and I’ll reach out to gently encourage you to become a monthly Patreon supporter next year (though if you want to start supporting monthly now as well, I definitely won’t stop you!)
If you are a FREE subscriber to this Substack: You don’t need to do anything. After October 31, you will start receiving emails from The Third Thing where you can choose to stay on board for this new creative venture, or unsubscribe. I won’t judge!
To give you a taste of what you’ll find paywalled on Patreon, here’s a free example of the kind of extra monthly updates you’ll get if you subscribe.
How To ALMOST Bike The Entire Kokopelli Trail
I have never considered myself much of an athlete. I had a brief stint in middle school playing volleyball and basketball, but when I didn’t make the varsity teams in ninth grade, I leaned into the rom-com cliché of absorbing myself in band and theater.
By high school, I already had a strong love for the outdoors, but beyond hiking, I wasn’t particularly aware there were other ways to be an athletic outdoorsy person. Plus, I’d never heard of a hiking team which is to say I grew up in such a small, rural place that I wasn’t aware athleticism could exist outside of rigid, organized sports teams.
In college, I experimented with going to the gym and even tried to get into running (which is when I learned I absolutely hate running), but I still never felt particularly athletic. I tried rock climbing with the outdoors club, but got extremely overwhelmed by the technical aspect of it. I also considered joining the ski and snowboard club, but my then-boyfriend (a just okay snowboarder) said he didn’t want to waste his trips waiting for me to learn how to ski and also that I’d probably hate it (cue him breaking his collar bone later that winter while snowboarding and being out for the rest of the season). I even gave a solid effort at road biking but got dropped within the first five miles of every group ride I attempted and so eventually gave that up too. I accepted that my maximum athleticism was probably hiking and doing yoga and not much more than that.
When I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2015, my head was full of daydreams of becoming the sort of rugged mountain woman I’d never had the opportunity to become in rural Pennsylvania. I swore to myself that I’d learn to ski, drive a stick shift, endure brutal winters, and generally be hardy and self-sufficient. I had a romanticism about moving west so thick you could scrape it with a butter knife.
I’m not sure I became hardy and self-sufficient in the way I pictured (and I still have not learned to drive stick) but I did however learn to ski (backcountry no less) and then mountain bike. And while it took me many years to get even remotely proficient at these things, it didn’t take long before I was hooked on the thrill of pushing the limits of what I thought my body was capable of. It’s not to say there weren’t a lot of tears and breakdowns on the way there (there were), but rather every ride I completed was another example of doing something I’d once convinced myself I’d never be able to do.
When I moved back to Colorado earlier this year after being away for too long, I knew I wanted to bless the return with some kind of ridiculous sufferfest. I’d wanted to bike the Kokopelli Trail for years but had never had the gumption or planning ability to make it happen. Now that I’d returned, I knew it was time.
Kokopelli Trail Logistics
Depending on how you go about it, the Kokopelli Trail is 158 miles long, running from Fruita, CO to Moab, UT. It climbs more than 15,000 feet, takes at least three days to complete, and connects two of my favorite destinations. In fact, I’d done my first mountain bike ride in Moab back in 2016 and ridden the trails in Fruita every year after that. The Kokopelli Trail felt like the perfect way to say, “Hello Intermountain West! I have returned!”
I pulled together a handful of friends who I knew would be down to give it a go and set a date for early October when I guessed the weather would be half-decent. My partner J would support us along the way so that we wouldn’t have to carry all of our gear and water making it all that more certain (in my mind) that we would have no trouble completing this trail.
Bikepacking.com says the Kokopelli Trail is 99% rideable and only rates it a 6.5/10 for difficulty (with most of that being around the difficulty of finding water — something we wouldn’t have to worry about with a support vehicle). The only doubt I had was whether or not we would have the energy to descend Porcupine Rim on the last day (the final portion of the epic Whole Enchilada) or if we’d need to peel off at Sand Flats Road and take some pavement into Moab.
The fact that out of 158 miles and 15,000 feet of climbing my only athletic hesitation was around a final technical descent says a lot about how much my athleticism had changed since high school and how much more I trusted my body. Even just a few years prior, I don’t think I would have had the nerve or the fitness to take on a trip like this.
The film does a pretty good job of laying out how the trip went, but here’s a rough summary:
Day 1: We rode 65 miles from the Kokopelli Trailhead to Fish Ford Campground near Cisco. It was a nine-hour day but felt doable.
Day 2: The plan was to ride 45 miles from Fish Ford to Polar Mesa, gaining about 7,000 feet of elevation. However, the trail turned into deep sand pits and extremely chunder-y, unrideable dust-filled descents. At our lunch stop, after five hours of riding, we’d only gone about 18 miles. At 4pm, when we thought we’d be done for the day, we were still climbing a massive mountain. By 6pm, we’d successfully walked our bikes down the backside of the mountain since only about 3.5% of the descent was rideable, and by 6:45pm we limped into camp 10 miles short of our goal for the day, feeling absolutely defeated. With 55 more miles of similarly difficult trail to go and another 8,000 feet of climbing on the last day, we realized we absolutely were not going to make it.
Day 3: Instead of attempting the long pedal up, we opted to ride out Onion Creek Road (one of the most gorgeous dirt roads I’ve ever had the pleasure of riding) and take Highway 128 all the way into Moab. This was still about 35 miles but cut off nearly all of the elevation. We ended in Lion’s Park, having ridden about 135 miles, feeling pretty impressed with ourselves.
Which is to say, we didn’t exactly make it. But also, I’d never done something quite so athletically challenging in my whole life. The three of us had such a blast, despite the saddle sores and exploding quads, that we’re already planning our next sufferfest.
I may not have played soccer in high school, made it onto a varsity team, or traveled around the tri-state area every weekend competing (barf), but I think there's more strength and endurance to my life now than I ever thought possible.
So here’s to adopting athleticism a little later in life. And also not doing organized sports. Cheers, friends!