Trip Summary Trip Dates: Sep 07 - Sep 13 Days: 7   Rest Days: 1   Level of Support: Self-contained Miles: 165 Average Miles Per Day: 33 Surface: Dirt Riders: 14 Type: Self-Contained   Meals: Shared cooking Accommodations: Camping Physical Difficulty: Advanced  Technical Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult Elevation: Elevation Alert Cost: $899 Booking Status: Filling Up

Grand Canyon National Park sees some five million visitors each year. That’s a lot of people. But even as the hordes contend for parking spaces and hotel rooms on the South Rim, you can have it all—and all to yourself, except for those bounding mule deer and cagey coyotes—as you mountain bike our 125-mile traverse of the Grand Canyon’s wild and remote North Rim.

Linking forest-embraced four-wheel-drive paths with canyon-rim singletrack trails, this very special tour takes in some the most spectacular and seldom-visited areas of Grand Canyon National Park and the adjacent Kaibab National Forest. After our exhilarating days of riding, we’ll spend nights camped under the stars. This is a land of extremely different worlds, really, ecologically speaking. Where the Colorado River flows five thousand feet below, the temperature can be thirty degrees warmer than where we’ll be riding on the North Rim at close to 9,000 feet. Nights will be chilly.

The Rainbow Rim Trail alone, one of the finest fat-tire rides in the West, is reason enough to sign up for this trip. Alternating between moist aspen groves and needle-strewn forest floors, the 18-mile-long trail frequently opens to reveal expansive viewpoints and knee-buckling canyon vistas. Designed by personnel from the North Kaibab Ranger District, the trail’s gradients never exceed 9 percent—meaning the entire trail is eminently rideable, whether you’re headed uphill or downhill.

Picture yourself at day’s end, leaning back against a rock at the edge of the canyon, sipping a hot beverage as a star-filled sky looms over the bottomless, purple-hued labyrinth spreading before you. The Grand Canyon is not the deepest cleft in the earth’s surface in North America—both Hell’s Canyon of the Snake River and Mexico’s Barranca del Cobre are deeper—but it is the most magnificent to gaze at, by virtue of its massive width and length, and the multi-hued colors of its walls. As you meditate on this miracle of geologic forces, you might get lucky and see an immense California condor soaring high on canyon thermals.

The Kaibab Formation, which you’ll be riding atop, caps the multiple rock layers exposed in the Grand Canyon—and, as such, it’s the youngest of the canyon’s layers at 270 million years old. At the other end of the spectrum, geologists tell us, the Vishnu basement gneisses and schists at the canyon’s bottom are nearly two billion years of age. The ecological zones of the Kaibab Plateau are nearly as varied as the infinite shades of the canyon’s rock layers, changing dramatically in response to such factors as elevation and sun exposure. You’ll see moist ravines holding groves of quaking aspen, wind-whipped oceans of native grasses and wildflowers, and forests of beefy ponderosa pines. Thriving at the plateau’s highest elevations of approximately 9,100 feet above sea level are boreal forests of spruce and fir similar to what you’d find in northern Canada—and in Arizona, yet.

For anyone who loves mountain biking and wild country, there’s no better weeklong trip in North America. Grand Canyon = Great Cycling.

For more detailed information, see Self Contained trip logistics.

READY TO GO?
You can sign up for the Grand Canyon North Rim tour now. Go to our online sign-up.