Bikepacking The Ute Mountain Tribal Park

April 2024 

It's hard for me to resist a good ruin. Ute Mountain Tribal Park is a much larger, more under-visited and less developed version of Mesa Verde National Park. You can't enter the park without a permit and must be accompanied by a local native american guide. 

Four Corner Guides located in Mancos Colorado and run by Lizzy Scully and Steve Fassbinder is the only guiding company allowed to tour the park via bicycle. I had been thinking of doing this tour for a couple years and although I normally don't do guided trips, I wanted to see these ruins. I don't know Lizzy or Steve personally but I have known of them and followed their adventures for years. It all seemed a great fit so I finally signed up.

Leaving the house a day or so early I stopped in Richfield Utah to ride the trail system there. I have been hearing good things about the trails here and can confirm that indeed, good things are happening. 

4/18. Arriving in the appointed place, at the appointed time, I met Lizzy and Saddle, her energetic Border Collie. Soon Bay showed up, the only other participant on the tour. While Lizzy snugged up some final details and ran some errands in town, Bay myself and Ian, who is Steve's cousin and helps out with pretty much whatever needs doing, rode our bikes back down to "Scullbinder Ranch." Four Corners Guides base of operations where Lizzy met us again. Lizzy cooked up an amazing salmon dinner for the four of us and after dinner Ian helped setting up Bay's ride for bikepacking. 

4/19. In the morning Lizzy shuttled Bay and I with our bikes and gear to the start of the ride which in our case was a little east of Mancos at Cherry Creek and met our guide Jon. Jon has massive experience earned through multiple hard core adventures throughout the fours corners region, Alaska and beyond. I felt lucky to have him with us. We had a pretty easy day of riding even though the distance was about 36 miles. We rode across plateau country before an exhilarating 1000 ft descent to the Mancos River inside the Tribal Park. Arriving relatively early at the campground in the canyon bottom we took a walk to Kiva Point experiencing the thrill of discovery on finding many pot shards and rock art. Ricky, our Ute Guide for the ruins tour tomorrow happened by while we were in camp and confirmed our meeting the following day for our tour and with a few additional folks. After that we just just nestled into camp and eventually drifted off to sleep.

4/20. Ricky and the additional tourists showed up right on time and with that our tour began. We initially stopped at a rock art panel where Ricky explained the entire emergence of humans upon the landscape and the four epochs of time in which humans have inhabited the land. As Ricky relayed it, we are currently within the fourth  epoch. The legend (or truth?) of the existence of humankind was truly fascinating to hear from an entirely different perspective. From there we moved on to the main attraction, the ancient ruins in Lion Canyon. Indescribable is the appropriate adjective. You just have to see these things and experience them for yourself. We started at a view point for "Fortification Ruins" These ruins are inaccessible being located in an alcove below a sheer cliff. Good viewing was available however from the canyon rim. Keep your eyes peeled too as I found an ancient arrowhead that even Ricky was surprised to see. (It bears mentioning here that any and all artifacts must be left in place!) From there we again piled into the van and drove around to the north rim of Lion Canyon. A trail led down to the cliff edge where we climbed down a log ladder to access the ledge trail used to approach the four different dwelling sites. There is simply too much to see in these various sites to attempt to describe within this short blog. Kivas, rooms, multi-story dwellings, ancient pictographs and petroglyphs and pottery shards etc. At Eagles Nest ruin there is a mandatory 30 ft log ladder used to access the ruin. A couple of folks opted to take a pass on this climb and waited on the ledge below. Eventually we made our way back to the van and thence back to our camp in the canyon. We had packed our bikes in the morning so we were quickly back on our bikes and made our way a relatively short distance up canyon to where we made our final camp.

Four Corners Guides has an agreement with the tribe that allowed us to do a bit of exploration on our own without a tribal guide. We spent the first half of the day hiking and exploring a bit then jumped on our bikes for the final 14 mile ride back up canyon to Scullbinder Ranch. 

I highly recommend this trip to anyone with an interest in ancient culture and has a bit of cycling experience even if not bikepacking. Four Corners Guides has some extra loaner bikepacking bags to help outfit your bike for the trip. Lizzy is extremely gracious and accommodating and Steve "Doom" Fassbinder has as much or more experience in various modes of travel from packrafts to bicycles as anyone in the four corners region and all of their guides are the most experienced and capable outdoor people you are ever likely to meet. And speaking of packrafts, they specialize in packraft instruction from beginner to expert as well as putting it all together with bikerafting. Check out their website.