Mountain Biking in The Grand Canyon »

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Mountain Biking in the Grand Canyon

WHAT DO YOU DO when you discover more than a thousand miles of spectacular, virtually unknown mountain biking terrain-some of the best trails you've ever ridden-- on the fringes of one of the most popular destinations in the West? If you're Chris Guibert and Suzanne Kaplan, you turn a 1978 Chevy RV into base camp, get a fast computer, and set out to map the rides.

More than 5 million people visit the Grand Canyon each year, but hardly any of them think about bringing their mountain bikes. That's because you can't actually pedal into the canyon-as in all national parks, mountain biking is prohibited. But the north and south rims of the canyon lie within the Kaibab National Forest, which is open to mountain biking.

"It's some of the coolest riding in the world, and after being there for almost six weeks, we'd only seen one other person on the trails," says Guibert, an accomplished mountain bike guide and explorer. "We stopped to tell him that, and he said the same thing to us."

Guibert's knobby-tire resume includes leading the first-ever commercial tour down the 75-day, 2700-mile Continental Divide mountain bike route from Canada to Mexico and producing the acclaimed Trails of the Tucson Area mountain bike guide and map. Now, working most of last summer and fall, continuing this spring and summer, he and Kaplan, his girlfriend, joined by their dog, Taddy Porter, are meticulously detailing every single ridable road and trail on the canyon's north and south rims for the Christmas 2000 debut of the first mountain biking guide to the Grand Canyon.

During their initial exploration of the area, the pair found the available maps to be "pretty inaccurate, out-of-date or missing stuff" and realized they'd have to physically verify every foot of terrain. They began near Jacob Lake, on the northeast side of the high end of the Kaibab Plateau. Parking the basecamp RV in a central location, they worked their way out via bicycle and Isuzu Trooper, in a 360-degree grid, and charted every road and trail they found, correlating their research with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey maps. This would usually take a week or two, then they would move the RV about 30 miles and start all over again, making sure their 360-degree "exploration zones" overlapped.

"First we drive the Trooper to rate all the roads, verify road markers, and pencil in new or unmarked roads. Then we explore the singletrack by bike, on a loop ride, and connect sections of trail with dirt roads," many of which are closed to motor vehicles, Guibert explains. Once they've mapped out an ideal 15- to 20-mile ride, they remount their bikes to pedal the actual ride description, using a GPS to mark all of the junctions along the way. Taddy Porter accompanies them on rides of up to 15 miles.

"In designing the ride descriptions, we try to include the coolest scenery and best layout," says Guibert. For example, on the north rim, a 50-mile section of the Arizona Trail runs north-south from the Utah border to the edge of the Grand Canyon National Park; they've broken it up into six different loop rides that let you complete the whole trail without ever backtracking. "That way you always have something new unfolding in front of you, and some of these doubletrack dirt roads the rides connect with are equally cool as the singletrack, traversing these amazingly beautiful alpine meadows," he says.

At night, when he and Kaplan return to the RV, they update their huge, handdrawn map-in-progress, download the GPS coordinates onto a Macintosh G3 laptop, and type in all the ride descriptions and pertinent logistics.

If only a small percentage of the Grand Canyon's 5 million yearly visitors buy their map, the financial reward will certainly compensate their effort. But what if the map draws throngs of riders and ruins the solitary nature of the trails they're mapping?.

"I always debate my potential impact before I go do something," Guibert says. "When we create this map, will there be a huge surge of people to the area? I don't think so. It'sjust aguide, not a full-- page ad that says 'Come bike the Canyon."'

And with the U.S. Forest Service opening itself more to the public's recreation needs, he says, helping people enjoy national forests is truly beneficial, "especially in an area like the north rim, where there was a lot of timber logging in the past. If they see the public wants to recreate on this land, they're not going to go clear-cut it next week."

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