Saturday, June 6, 2009
After finally running the full Kokopelli Trail last month, I decided I wanted to finish off the ‘Grand Loop’ trails. Today I tackled the second trail; the Tabeguache Trail. The Tabeguache (pronounced ‘tab-a-watch’) Trail is mountain bike trail that starts out near Montrose, CO and ends up near Grand Junction. Like the Kokopelli Trail, it is made up mostly of 4-wheel drive roads with a few sections of single-track mixed in. However, unlike the Kokopelli, there is not a lot of information about the Tabeguache available…especially for someone wanting to take a Jeep along as much of the route as possible.
I spent the last week and a half researching the trail and putting together my best guess at a track using a bunch of BLM and Forest Service maps along with Google Earth. While the track I ended up putting together was pretty close, I did run into some problems early on. I ran into some downed trees, an ATV only section of trail and a few locked gates at private property.
I left Montrose around 8am and got back home around 7:30, so I was on the trail for almost 12 hours! Including all of my backtracking, I ended up traveling just over 160 miles off the pavement.
I’ll be putting together a much more detailed page about the Tabeguache Trail shortly (once I get the track I kept cleaned up) so I won’t go into much detail about the actual route here. Since I was more concerned about not getting lost today I didn’t end up taking too many photos, plus the skies were cloudy most of the day so I didn’t get that many good pictures, either.
Anyway…enough talk, here’s some pictures 
Signs at the trailhead in Shavano Valley
The trail was fairly well marked, but there were a number of broken and missing signs along the way, too
Headed down to Dry Creek
My first wrong turn….my Jeep won’t fit over that bridge 
Dry Creek is not very dry
A few rough sections early on in the trail
Climbing up higher onto the Uncompahgre Plateau
Up in the Aspens
Waterfall
I was able to move this one by hand…
La Sals in the distance
Dominguez Canyon
Finally…some blue sky as I near Grand Junction
Unaweep Canyon
Now, it’s time for me to get some sleep! Enjoy!