Bike Destination: Grand Junction, Colorado

In western Colorado, the Colorado River has carved away epochs of sediment, exposing the visible bones of the Colorado Plateau. Because of the pronounced division between layer-cake ages of rock, geologists flock to the area around Grand Junction and the Colorado National Monument for intensive study. For mountain bikers, the beveled ledges of Velcro-grip sandstone demand equally intense focus—and (at least as far as fat-tired riders are concerned) greater rewards.

For local riders, Grand Junction's Lunch Loops trail system, three miles outside the historic downtown core, provides a workday and weekend escape for the bike, if not the brain.

John Howe, the executive director of the Grand Valley Trails chapter of the Colorado Plateau Mountain Bike Trail Association, the local International Mountain Bike Association (IMBA)-affiliated advocacy group moved to Grand Junction from Colorado’s Front Range in 1991 for a job at a law firm, in large part because Howe had brought his mountain bike with him when he first visited the city for his interview. The trails of the area were the best signing bonus a mountain biker could ask for.

Howe is quick to note that at that time, there was no Lunch Loops, there was The Lunch Loop—riding up the babyheads and boulders of Tabeguache and descending the whoops and rock drops of Moto.

Dictated both by the landscape and the desires of early riders, as the Lunch Loop expanded to become Lunch Loops, technical trails like Holy Cross and the Gunny Loop, with their nearly nonstop chunder, set the technical tone.

The Ribbon is indicative of early trail revolution at the Lunch Loops. A three-mile, 1600-vertical-foot descent on which riders can reach speeds pushing 50mph on the smooth, steeply angled sandstone, in the 90s Howe and other locals climbed up the user-created route before blasting down the graveled Little Park Road—the ledgy, technical moves would have been unthinkable on their fully rigid bikes. With contemporary rigs, features like the Toilet Bowl require nerves of steel.

After local riders, working with the BLM, began creating sanctioned, bike-specific trails such as Holy Bucket and Clunker, the rugged character remained; there’s been little sanding-down of the demanding nature of the network. Even a trail like Tabeguache, an old roadbed-turned-connector trail, features numerous knee-high drops belying its blue rating.

“Even the intermediate trails have some technical moves on them, maybe even a little bit of exposure,” says Howe. “You definitely have to pay attention; if you don’t, you can easily hook a pedal or end up on your face.”

The preponderance of rocky tech that can catch snoozing shredders unaware has bred excellent all-around riders: the Colorado Mesa University (CMU) mountain biking team has won the national collegiate championships the last four years running.

On the other end of the age spectrum, Grand Junction-based Boneshaker Adventures molds first-graders into first-rate riders.

Boneshaker owner Dawn Cooper actually picked up a mountain bike for the first time as part of the CMU mountain biking squad, when a team member spotted her in the climbing gym and asked if she’d fill out the women’s roster. Cooper, who showed up in Carhartts and a climbing helmet to her first ride, went on to race downhill professionally on the national circuit. But she always had in the back of her mind a desire to start a mountain biking instruction program back in Grand Junction. Boneshaker Adventures began with after-school youth programs in 2016 and has since expanded to include women’s clinics and private instruction and guiding.

Cooper sees firsthand how the Lunch Loops demand both technique and mental toughness.

“You have to be really present and really focused to ride the trails here, and that’s actually the whole premise of my program: bike skills are life skills,” says Cooper. “We’re out there riding with kindergartners through high school students, and each week they’re looking at ‘How do I get over this obstacle on the trail,’ and then the instructors are applying that to day-to-day life.”

“In riding hard trails we become more resilient.”

That resilience permeates the community. The boom and subsequent bust of the oil-and-gas industry that fueled Grand Junction’s economy for so long required the city of 70,000 to diversify its economy. Removed from the mountain bike Mecca of Moab, two hours to the west, and the mining-turned-mountain-town boom times and state capital politics of the Front Range, the largest Colorado city west of the Continental Divide has had the latitude to forge its own path, in which outdoor recreation is simply one piece of the puzzle.

“Grand Junction is the desert, it’s not easy living, and there aren’t a lot of us,” says Cooper. “But there’s this Wild West mentality that we have to work together where we are.”

Cooper and other locals emphasize the ease with which user groups, from COPMOBA to the motorcyclists who developed many of the trails tracing Grand Junction to the Good Old Broads hiking group, collaborate on new trail construction. More than three-quarters of the land mass of Mesa County is public land, which allows users to spread out and forge their own path.

"Lunch Loops historically gets fewer out-of-town visitors and a lot more locals" than the more well-known Kokopelli and 18 Road trail systems in neighboring Fruita, says Howe, perhaps in part because of the technical skills required to ride Lunch Loops, and in part because of Grand Junction’s spotlight-shunning nature.

But "for the locals" doesn't mean "locals-only", and riders are happy to share their tracks; in the wine bars and women’s boutiques, the employees discuss what trails they hit over the weekend. Spend more than five minutes downtown or at a trailhead, and you're a local too. The quiet confidence bred by desert living means that Grand Junction riders and residents welcome everyone. The Lunch Loops makes fast friends in addition to fast riders.