White Rim Trail

This last few days Jess and I have been out biking in the Canyonlands of Southern Utah. Along with 13 friends from Salt Lake, two support vehicles, a gang-load of cerveza, and some cheeky shenanigans, we rode the White Rim Trail. The White Rim trail follows the rim of a cliff for about 75 miles in between the Colorado and Green Rivers.
The first two days we rode about 30 miles or so; the third day we only had to ride about 10-15. The riding wasn't really all that technical and the weather was perfect! The highlight was just getting down to the desert and just hanging out with friends. It was also really good spending time with Jessie; that's not something we've been able to do of late.
King of the Cheeky Shenanigans, Tom Zimmer, livened up the mornings with a version of the Tom and Cathy show--you had to be there to understand. There was sausage in every meal. There was dust in every crevice. Keri fell off her bike at every opportunity. There was sky everywhere, and red rock cliffs dropped off one side of the trail with an imposing verticality only matched by the way they rose upward on the other side of the trail. Towers, both tall and lean and short and stumpy rose up from the basins like the phallus of every man's envy. Beer flowed like beer...mostly out of the can and into a parched mouth. Hill climbs made the meek suffer and challenged the strong-ish.
While we were out on the White Rim, Tom and I were able to climb Standing Rock while we were out there. It was great. Four pitches, lots of 5.10 climbing, an .11c crux section that I took a couple falls on, and a stunning top-out. We got up there just in time to watch the sun go down. It's known to have the best height to width ratio of any desert tower out there, meaning that it's really tall and really slender.

Not quite the ratio of my envy, but it'll certainly do.