The Slickrock Trail: How a Motorcycle Path Remade a Town
Near Moab, Utah
In nineteen sixty-nine, a Moab local named Dick Wilson mapped out a trail across the sandstone benchlands east of town for small off-road motorcycles, specifically the Honda Trail Ninety, a lightweight step-through bike popular at the time. Wilson marked the route with white dots painted on the rock, and the Slickrock Trail was officially open. Wilson had no idea what he had started.
The trail was ten and a half miles of petrified dunes, tilted fins of sandstone, and exposed rock faces where gravity pulled in directions a rider did not expect. When mountain biking emerged as a sport in the nineteen eighties, riders discovered that the Slickrock Trail was exactly what the new sport needed: technically demanding terrain, dramatic scenery, and the counterintuitive physics of rubber tires on rough sandstone, which provided remarkable grip where smooth rock would seem to offer none. The trail that motorcycles could only partially navigate became the defining mountain biking destination on earth.
By the nineteen nineties mountain biking had become a major part of Moab's economy alongside tourism to the national parks. The Slickrock Trail had become so widely known that it appeared in international cycling publications and attracted riders from Europe and Australia. Today it is one of the most recognized trails anywhere, its white dot markers still faded but legible on the same sandstone Wilson first painted more than fifty years ago.
