There are no cars. There is no one. Just three riders and miles of road. A bird caws with startling clarity, just like in the movies
If there was a worldwide competition for yellow, Utah would triumph every time. Its autumnal aspens are the winning hand, but it’s more than just their colour. Their leaves are crepe-paper counters hanging by stems so close to seasonal failure that they quiver at the slightest breath, and it’s this quivering that brings their yellow alive. Set against the trees’ silvery bark and brilliant sky, this single hue morphs into a full spectral gamut of all known yellows, gold, lemon, honey, fire.
When the wind blows, the leaves ripple like sequined cloth, tick-ticking against each other, thousands raining to the ground, where they rot into orange, then brown, and then are gone.
It will be a few more weeks before these aspens are truly threadbare. In the meantime, we couldn’t have picked a finer month – late October – to come here to ride.
Fast woman, slow men
I meet my ride companions Seth and Kyle on a gloriously blue morning on the edge of Salt Lake City, a city which is just that, perched on the eastern edge of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. But while this hypersaline lake (which would not only be a great name for a brand of electrolytes but describes water with higher salt levels than the sea) is vast, it is nothing compared to the lake from whence it came, Lake Bonneville.
Once upon a when, let’s say around 18,000 years ago, Lake Bonneville was at its biggest: 51,000km and 300m deep. So big, in fact, that it caused a year-long flood with water gushing into nearby rivers and on to the Pacific Ocean. Can you imagine being big enough to flood
