GCBAR Day 5

GCBAR Day 5, Sep 17, 2019:
As the sun rises on Point Sublime, we groan ourselves awake later than usual having been disturbed multiple times by our fellow campers trying to escape from their windy perch.

On yesterday's ride we discovered that our next destination per our GPS track, Fire Point, has ironically been closed because of a fire. We need an alternate route. We huddle at our nice picnic table and lay out the paper maps.

(I should interject that it is a very good idea to bring maps of the area apart from a GPS. It is difficult to determine alternate routes with a small GPS screen and I am not sure I would trust auto routing in this situation.)

We determine that we must ride the 30 miles back to the main North Rim road and top off with gas because our planned next route will test the limits of our gas range before another fuel stop. There are a myriad of roads in this region and not all are through roads. We came to appreciate what dave6253 must have gone through to map out these routes. Russ had downloaded an Avenza map for the region and that, together with the paper map, helped us plan our detour.

We breakfasted, packed up, and went on our way. One of the sand pit meadows caught me out and I went down but no damage or injury occurred. When we were finally back on the GCBAR tracks we began riding the multiple finger overlooks, starting with Timp Point. If I ride this again I will skip Timp Point.

North Timp Point is better and does not require much of a hike to get to the views.

There is a rim trail in this region that mountain bikers like.

We visited all of what I am going to call the "finger points" from Timp Point northward. Frankly, it started getting a little tedious for me going back and forth on all of those vista roads but the north-bound route connecting them was a fun ride. I think my problem was that we were using up our gasoline range and the views weren't much different from one another. My personal recommendation would be to just pick a couple of them and go on to Crazy Jugs.

Likewise, the ride out and views at Sowats Point were terrific

Our destination or the night was Jump Up Cabin. I had reserved the cabin at https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/251825. We made the mistake of thinking that Jump Up cabin was on the track. We kept riding thinking that we would come upon the cabin but it is actually on a turnoff before Jump Up Divide. By the time we realized we had missed it, we were 7.5 miles out of our way and had to backtrack, using up more of our limited range between fuel stops.

VIDEO Day 5 to Jump Up Cabin