nytimes article

http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/06/15...tml?ref=travel

this is a cool article!


Where Mountain Bikers Carved Their Dream Terrain
By ABRAHM LUSTGARTEN

THERE is a spot on the Zippety trail, a sinewy, 10-inch-wide track of hard-packed dirt near Fruita, Colo., where the sides drop away so steeply it’s like biking down the tip of a knife blade. It’s the kind of trail that demands a pause before you commit yourself, so I gazed out over the broad Grand Valley to the snaking Colorado River and the red sandstone towers of the Colorado National Monument beyond.

People in Fruita — the ones climbing out of full-size pickups in wide-brim cowboy hats and snakeskin boots — tend to call this God’s Country. That’s fine, I thought. I could use the good vibes.

Click. My cleats settled into the pedals, and my front wheel dropped over the block of stone that starts the narrow, impossibly pitched ride. The knobby tread of tires grabbed the dirt as my weight slid back, so far that the seat grazed my navel.

Brake discs started to howl. Surely the bike was about to twist out and pitch me headlong into the hot, dry air. But just as quickly, the moment passed — I was still riding. Gravity had been cheated.

It’s experiences like this that keep bringing people to Fruita, a once-struggling, now fast-growing town of roughly 10,000 perched not far from the Utah state line, home to arguably the best, and least-known, mountain biking in the United States.

That’s a bold billing for a town that has grown in the shadow of Moab, Utah, about an hour and a half away. But Fruita (FROO-tah) has all the thrills and geological magic of Moab without the crowds, Jeeps and neon signs that have turned that place into a sort of amusement park of the Western landscape. It has managed to preserve a feeling of community and authenticity.

Just over 10 years ago, Fruita was a depressed agricultural town with an oil refinery being shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, Troy Rarick, a 44-year-old cyclist from nearby Grand Junction, conceived a plan to transform Fruita by giving it a new identity: ecotourism hub.

“So many people were driving from Denver to Moab,” Mr. Rarick said. “Fruita is surrounded by two million acres of public land. Why was there nothing here?”