I know where the militia trains

Saturday I decided to do some exploring and ended up riding to the top of Lake Mountain, which is part of the range to the west of Utah Lake. The route begins on a dirt road that heads west from hwy. 68 (Redwood Road). The turnoff is about 17 miles south of Lehi Main, just look for the stop sign and that's the road you want to take.

Starting Point (note stop sign*):

*I point this out as there are many, many dirt roads running off into the foothills along HWY 68, but none of them have a stop sign like this one.

The first 5 miles is a good warm up on a well-maintained gravel/dirt road. It's mostly all uphill with one downhill, but the grade is never more than 5 or 6%. Then for the next 5 miles, the grade turns to a steady 7-8% with really no flats. The road also turns more rocky and uneven. Near the top, I ran into some patches of snow and some runoff, but it was manageable.

Here's the last bit before reaching the summit where there are various radio station towers.

It ended up being an 11 mile climb and 3,100 vertical ft. It's a good, long early-season climbing workout, perfect for spring when it's not scorching hot and for when you don't feel like doing laps on low elevation single track.

The view at the top was pretty rewarding. I had prepped a really cool panoramic photo that I created using Adobe Photoshop that I was hoping to share, but for some reason it was giving me an error when I tried to upload to blogger, so here's the best I could do:

The descent was fast and fun.

A few miles from my car, I looked ahead and saw about 20 "soldiers" alongside the road dressed in full camo, boots and carrying assualt rifles*. They even had a big flag flying in the wind and it wasn't the stars and stripes. As I approached, one of the yahoos was aiming his rifle directly accross the road in the direction of the area I was about to enter. I slowed down and waited until his buddy told him to put down his gun. I passed by and said, "hey.....what's up?" and then hurriedly picked up the pace.

*pretty sure these were airsoft guns as they had the orange tip on the barrel, but they sure looked real, like this one:

Different strokes for different folks. I'll ride my bike up a mountain in the middle of the desert and you can practice shooting plastic bb's at your buddies.