The raspberries are ripe on the Bench Creek trail. That’s an important detail to keep in mind when riding it because, just when you are bonked and ready to lie down and die, you hit this terrible rocky section that is pretty much impossible to ride. So while slogging your bike through the talus field, there are wild raspberries along the way. They are kind of puny this year, but the sharp rocks underfoot don’t seem so bad with a mouthful of tart little raspberries.
Bench Creek is a different kind of mountain biking than our buffed-out, well-maintained trails in Park City. It’s a real back-country route, mostly unsigned and unmarked. You never know what you will run into. There must be a hundred trees blown down across the trail. The long climb up is a sure thing, as is the sweet downhill. But there are always surprises. I rode it Wednesday with some friends. Some of them had not ridden it before. It’s bow-hunt season, so the woods were filled with cammo-wearing guys with painted faces (it looked like a health-care town-hall meeting at the trailhead). We rode in the middle of the day, so the hunters had mostly gone back to their camps until the deer start moving around again in the evening. I don’t worry about getting shot by a bow hunter. They have to be at close enough range that there is little chance of being mistaken for a deer -unlike the rifle hunt, when anything that moves is a likely target.
The sheep are still on the Forest Service land for another week or so. Riding through a herd of sheep that has bedded down for its midday nap is a challenge. Standing up and fully alert, a sheep is dumber than a box of rocks. Once you get them stuffed with the morning’s graze and half asleep chewing their cud, sheep are so dumb they make Congress look brilliant. You have to get off your bike and walk through them, and they are so groggy that I occasionally had to give one a little poke to wake it up – “excuse me, madam, you are blocking the trail.” They stand up and make a leisurely move to the side. There are always a few who insist on running along the trail, too.
But where there are sheep, there are sheep dogs. The dogs are not distracted by cud-chewing and came charging after us barking ferociously. Once I started talking to them, the dogs were a little confused and backed off. One of my friends speaks Spanish, and I tried to get him to explain the situation to the dogs. Sheep dogs don’t speak English. Apparently he didn’t have the proper sheepherder vocabulary, and the dogs continued to bark and growl – from a short distance – as they tried to figure out if we were people or sneaky, talking coyotes. I didn’t tell them how much I like lamb chops.
On the descent, we ran into some people on horseback. Fortunately it was in a nice clearing and everybody saw everybody else. We stopped and had a good conversation about the various trails in the area and what connected to what, and where they went.
A little later, we came across a couple of guys on motorcycles. Until recently, the trail had been closed to motorized use. But there was a lawsuit, and because the Forest Service had made the decision to close the trail on a blue piece of paper instead of goldenrod, the rule closing the trail was thrown out, and there are now motorcycles on the trail.
These guys were amazingly considerate. They turned off their engines and pulled over to let us pass exhaust-free. I said there were four of us, spread out a little, and they said there were just the two of them, and they would wait for us to get passed. I mentioned the two on horseback they would quickly catch up to. We all agreed that it was about as glorious a day as God ever created, and that somebody (perhaps somebody riding a motorcycle instead of a bicycle) should pack a chain saw up there and clear the trail in a few places. It was the kind of exchange that gives you some reason to believe that shared-use trails – and maybe even a civil society – are actually possible.
It’s a burly ride, the sort of thing that leaves you completely wrung out at the end. But it was a perfect day and the sort of idyllic sharing of the public lands that doesn’t happen often enough. Bow hunters, mountain bikers, equestrians, big sheep dogs and sleepy sheep, motorcyclists, and hikers, all savoring a beautiful fall day in the forest, and all getting along with each other in the process. That’s very cool.
Tom Clyde served as Park City attorney in the 1980s and is the author of “More Dogs on Main Street.” He has been a columnist at The Park Record for more than 20 years.