Endurance Ride Fever

Friday July 29 2011

Gold Fever.

It's one of the main driving forces behind the flood of a quarter million emigrants that travelled overland to the West in the mid 1800's. Many of them found their way along the California Trail and laid eyes on the City of Rocks in what is now southern Idaho, at the southern end of the Albion Mountains.

It's Endurance Ride Fever that brings some people to places like this - the desire to ride well, and ride far, to explore beyond the boundaries; the hankering to show off and share beautiful country, the taste of dust, and the flavor of how it was in the old days for the pioneers.


We got a taste of the City of Rocks National Reserve today, riding a 10-mile loop around the valley of the City of Rocks, riding below soaring granite spires where turkey vultures soared on the updrafts. We trotted along a part of the California Trail, riding around Register Rock, where many emigrants wrote their names in axle grease, which you can still see today.


What we saw was the tip of the iceberg. What we saw only whetted our appetite.

We've got Endurance Ride Fever, bad.

[slide show here]