Epic Bike Trip: Moab to Yosemite

As usual this post is written on another car ride, from Bakersfield, California on the way to Yosemite. We will be spending the weekend in Yosemite exploring and hanging out. After Moab, Utah we headed for Mt. Zion National Park to spend the night before riding in Bootleg, about 4 hours away in Nevada. We are all used to the awesomeness of Pisgah and the ability to just show up and camp, we didn't realize that half of the U.S. lives in RVs and books nights in National Parks 6 months in advance. So when we asked a big ol' ranger in Zion if there was camping, he laughed at us. Not Funny. So after blowing $50 on park entrance fees we were forced to turn around for camping...

On the way out the ranger gave us a list of commercial campsites (ugh) but then told us there was BLM (Bureau of Land Management) Land on mile marker 20... so we turned onto a dirt road called Dalton Wash and found possibly the best camping spot so far. There was even a nice spot to push the bikes up right by camp.

View from our campsite

Biking by the Campsite, Jon (black) and Jacob (black and white) tearing it up (Below)

After Zion we went to Bootleg Canyon, NV to ride. We were going to spend the whole day and camp the night there but the wind was so bad (40-50 mph gusts) we pushed on to California after one run, three flat tires, getting a little lost, and taking no pictures. We had an 8 hour drive to our next destination (Yosemite) and we left Bootleg around 6pm. So I got couchsurfing.com and found a place for use to stay in Bakersfield, CA, a little more than halfway to Yosemite.

For those of you who don't know what couchsurfing is, it's an organization that you can join to find people to meet and places to stay all over the world. You have a profile like facebook, however you cannot change anything anyone says about you. This way you can find people who have had multiple people stay with them and have only good things said about them. This is how we found Isaiah. He was kind enough to let the FIVE of us stay with him, with only 5 hours notice. He even cooked us an amazing breakfast the next morning. It was so nice to get a break from thermarests and the blazing sun at 6:30 in the morning...

Delicious Breakfast!