Mountain Biking the Kokopelli Loops in Fruita, Colorado

Last weekend Mike and I took a 3 day weekend to head to Fruita. This is one of our favorite times of the year to go to the desert to do some mountain biking and other activities because the temperature doesn’t get too hot. I don’t think the temperature got much above 75 the whole time we were there. This was our first time to Fruita, and lucky for us we were going with our friends, Mike and Liz, who had been there many times before.

We took Friday off from work and decided to mountain bike some of the Kokopelli trail loops right outside of Fruita. Unfortunately, Liz wasn’t able to get the day off from work so it was a day of me and the boys (both named Mike!). We parked the car and started out with a warm up lap on a trail called Rustler’s. It had probably been over a month since I had last ridden my bike so it was nice to get my wheels back under me on this beginner/intermediate trail. I really enjoyed the trail and the views were beautiful. All of the leaves on the trees back home in Summit County had been long gone, but there was still plenty of yellow to see in Fruita. The loop went along the Colorado River.

Next, we headed to some of the Kokopelli loops which also were along the Colorado River for much of it. We walked down the well-known Horsethief Bench. I had been hoping to see someone ride it, but the only people we saw were walking it as well. We ended up riding around 15 miles that day and had a great time.

I saw one thing I’d never seen before - we watched ~8 people riding up part of one of the loops on unicycles. Talk about needing balance! It looked terrifying and there was quite a bit of dismounting going on. I had no idea that was even a sport, but if you Google “mountain unicycling,” you will very much see that it is. It’s always neat to see something totally new.