Journeys: Antelope Island, Utah - Biking and Camping

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Antelope Island, Utah - Biking and Camping

Shawn, Keith, Melissa, and I took part in the annual Antelope Island by Moonlight bike ride on July 19. We decided to make it an all-night event and reserved a campsite at Bridger Bay so that we could relax before and after the ride. We headed to the island after work on Friday evening and set up camp while watching a spectacular sunset. The weather was perfect and the bugs were minimal which was somewhat of a surprise for Antelope Island!

Shawn setting up his tent

My tent

Sunset on Antelope Island

Keith and Melissa at camp

Sunset on Antelope Island

The ride started at White Rock Bay and made a 25 mile out-and-back trip to Fielding Garr Ranch where there was music, food, and water. The ride was easy and fun, and many families participated in the event. Some bikers even decorated their bikes with lights and dressed up in costume. Although it was easy, it was certainly not well supported. Shawn was unable to get any assistance after getting a flat tire and finally got a ride back to camp after 2am. We stayed up well into the night enjoying the great weather and moon shining brightly over the island.

Keith heading to White Rock Bay

Pre-ride party at White Rock Bay

Melissa, Keith, and Shawn

Fielding Garr Ranch mid-ride party

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards"

-- Edward Abbey

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls. "

-- John Muir

"To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from."

-- Terry Tempest Williams

"There may be people who feel no need for nature. They are fortunate, perhaps. But for those of us who feel otherwise, who feel something is missing unless we can hike across land disturbed only by our footsteps or see creatures roaming freely as they have always done, we are sure there should be wilderness. Species other than man have rights, too. Having finished all the requisites of our proud, materialistic civilization, our neon-lit society, does nature, which is the basis for our existence, have the right to live on? Do we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness this right?"

-- Margaret E. Murie

"I have always been unsatisfied with life as most people live it. Always I want to live more intensely and richly. Why muck and conceal one's true longings and loves, when by speaking of them one might find someone to understand them, and by acting on them one might discover oneself?"

-- Everett Ruess