Roamin' the Western Slope in Fruita, CO

The first time I had ever stepped foot in the majestic North Fruita Desert was back in the summer of 2012. My best buddy and I decided it was time to uproot our existence on the East Coast, and pave a new life in the great American West. Like all great adventures start, we packed our lives away into the depths of a 1996 Ford conversion van. Both of us had very limited funds, but big dreams of new beginnings. My buddy Mike was accepted to a design school in the PNW, so he had a way more legitimate plan than I did, but that didn't deter me at all. I was dying to move away from my hometown and experience something totally different than what I was used to back east.


A few years back two of my buddies had taken a trip to Colorado, and they had mentioned Fruita and Grand Junction as sort of a mecca for mountain biking. I saw their pictures and listened to their stories about this great desert terrain and I was pretty much instantly sold. I needed to go to this place and experience it first hand.


So as our van chugged on down I-70, we pretty much pinned it until reaching the Colorado border. With the mundane Mid-West behind us, we started to formulate a plan of attack for Colorado. Western Colorado was definitely our highlighted area of interest. After doing my first big slopestyle competition in Winter Park, we decided it was time to move on and spend some time in the desert.


We rolled up to the town of Fruita in the middle of the night, way past a reasonable hour to get directions to the campsites from anybody in town. After a few wrong turns and one mishap on some ranchers farm, we decided to phone a good friend for proper directions. Maybe we weren't in the right state of mind to be navigating through the strangest road names I'd ever heard of. It was late at night and our navigating skills were not too keen to this unfamiliar territory. So we get on the phone with Adam, who is looking at a map on his computer back on the east coast, and he starts rattling off commands like "take a left on M 1/3rd St." and "then take a right on O 3/10th Road."


Next thing we know, we are out of the town and in the middle of nowhere. Mobbing the van up the most wash boarded out roads we had ever been on. Now let me give you some insight on the condition of our naively reliable vehicle we had been using for this cross country trip. This van had a cracked radiator from the start of the trip, some bad drum brakes that always needed to be jimmy rigged, and then on top of it all, the whole van was sagging way down into its suspension due to our insane load of mostly useless stuff that we decided to bring along with us.



Suddenly, the next thing that occurred was a huge plume of white smoke coming from the engine as we careened down the washboard roads. Not really even knowing if we were going the right way, we pulled over to assess the van. The van had probably overheated a dozen times already during our trip due to the worsening crack in the radiator. So the smoke and the overheating didn't really freak us out too much. We let it cool down, refilled the radiator with water, and then continued up the washboard road. We finally saw a sign that we were in the right place and eventually rolled into camp. Keep in mind this is all in the dark of night. We had no idea what kind of landscape we were rolling up on and didn't have much idea what the desert was really like anyway.




As we unloaded camp, Mike realized he must have lost one of his boots from the inside of the van when we stopped to cool down. As he started to walk back down the road from camp he also noticed a faint path of oil, starting from our van and eventually leading all the way back to where we had stopped. Sure enough, there laid his boot next to a small pool of strange smelling oil. We grabbed it and ran back to camp to further inspect the vans condition.


As we looked further into it, we realized that the transmission pan had rattled loose due to the relentless washboard road (and maybe some illegitimate mechanical work) and had leaked the entirety of transmission fluid out of the pan, but we weren't going to let that seemingly major problem even begin to bring us down. After watching the cosmic night sky and not sleeping too much, we arose to the sun and we finally set eyes on the beautiful North Fruita Desert. We had no idea what to visually expect rolling up at night, but we were not even close to underwhelmed when the sun began to cast sweet morning light onto the mountains above us.


Next, we decided that the van was our first order of business before we could set our bike tires down in this amazing place. So are only choice was to coast the van, that was now not shifting properly all the way back down to the town. Somehow it was able to coast all the way down, mostly in neutral and we made it to a NAPA, where the helpful tech knew exactly how much oil we needed to use and what size wrench we were going to need to re-secure the transmission pan.


Miraculously, after the fix, the van fired right back up and started shifting just as smooth as before. So we headed back up the washboard road once again. Finally, we reached camp, put some breakfast down, and then we were ready to make our maiden voyage on the 18 road trails. After a less than ideal night, we spent the whole day, pretty much until sundown, pedaling our hearts out through this serene place they call the North Fruita Desert. We were so jazzed on the endless miles of flowy singletrack that we end up staying for almost a week before eventually moving on to Moab.


Even though we had some pretty awful luck in the beginning of our Fruita experience, the landscape, the trails and the town were incredible enough to almost make us forget anything bad had ever even happened. To this day, and probably forever, Fruita will stand out in my mind as this gem location that I will always come back for as long as I'm alive. If you haven't been, put it on your bucket list and you will not be disappointed, no matter what happens. What I have learned from this desert, is that spending time in a place like this is refreshingly good for the soul, and can give you a whole new perspective and attitude about life.

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MENTIONS: @JayTrautman

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