The Guacamole Trail, Virgin Utah
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| Oh my what a great group of trails. While this is not a large trail system, this place has a ton of awesomeness! The sweet ribbons of dirt singletrack pass through forests of pinion, juniper or other assorted brush, wide open areas of slickrock and other technical rocky goodness. The ledges and other natural rock features also offer up plenty of "stuntage". All of this with a backdrop of Zion National Park, Gooseberry Mesa and the Virgin River watershed. With trail names like Guacmole, Holy Guacamole, Salt on the Rim and Lime how could you not have a great time out here? |
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| Hazards: Bring your own water, none is available anywhere near the mesa. Uh don't fall off the mesa. |
| Ride Notes: I refer to waypoints contained in the GPS files and on the map. None of the trails are marked with thier name. |
  My first time riding here was done on the first day of a weekend trip to the area in 2015. The entire southwest seemed to be dealing with late spring storms as made the road run from the LoSoCal area to Utah. As we rolled through St George and Hurricane we were intermittently getting rained on but I had learned that in this neck of the woods if you don’t like the weather wait five minutes. As we rolled through Virgin there were clear skies above and the dirt road that goes up to the mesa had just a puddle or two. |
  From the trailhead (Waypoint: Guacamole TH) we headed out to the southwest on across and open rockslab slickrock (more correctly would be to use the term "griprock"). On the open slickrock the trail is marked with rockcairns that are either stacked or put in small wire baskets. When you pass by one, another one should be within sight. If you have ever ridden Gooseberry Mesa or Little Creek Mesa you will will know the drill but there are some nuanced differences. It was a bit brisk and windy but beautifully sunny when we rolled out onto the first trail segment called Margarita. This was a new trail to me and I was stoked to check it out. At 1.0 miles (GUAC-01) we came to the junction with the Salt on the Rim Trail. We hung a right here and enjoyed some rim goodness. |
 We also and got in some good views along with the sight of incoming weather. |
| Someone in Seattle once told me that there is no such thing as bad weather only bad gear. We had the gear, but from the best we could tell it looked like this storm would pass us just to the south. We did end up get a little sprinkling on us as we made our way out along Salt on the Rim to the main Guacamole Loop but it only lasted a few minutes. |
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| At 2.0 miles(GUAC-02) we rejoined the Magarita trail, turned south. At 2.5 miles (GUAC-03) we meet came to the junction of the main Guacamole loop. We turned to our right were we enjoyed a combination of some straight up hero dirt coupled with some rock slabbage. We intended to keep taking every fork to the right but at around (GUAC-04) we missed one of the first junction for the Lime loop and just kept having fun. We eventually got on the Lime trail and were nearly all the way to GUAC-08 before we backtracked to to GUAC-07 to get onto Holy Gucamole. (The tracks we missed are on the map by way of some folks donating thier tracks to complete the map) |
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From GUAC-07 we took Holy Guacamole 1.3 miles to the southern tip of the mesa where we had some good views of Zion Nation Park as well as the north rim of Gooseberry Mesa from here. It was a lot more dirt singletrack on the way out to the southern tip that most of the early segments. |
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  After our fill of the views from the southern end of the mesa we continued our counterclockwise route. This is a fantastic section of single track with good technical challenges through amazing landscape with Zion National Park just a stones through away. The Holy Guacamole goodness brought us back to the other side of the Lime Loop (GUAC-08) where we earlier. From there we continued on the Lime to GUAC-09 where were hooked up with the other side of the Guacamole trail. |
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  We countinued the counterclockwise action until we reconnected with the Margarita trail (GUAC-03) and turned north to head back to the trailhead. We when reached the junction of the Salt on the Rim trail (GUAC-02) we stayed on the Margarita trail and made our way back to the trailhead This was some grade A trail awesomeness and it will certainly not be my last time riding on this mesa. Our mileage came in right at 11 miles but your mileage will certainly vary. If we would have gotten here earlier in the day I could have seen us going back for a second loop in the opposite direction. That was not the case with us on this first trip. Shortly after we got off the mesa and headed back to St George we got into a good bit of rain. We were pretty stoked at our window of fortune with the rain and we were particularly glad we had decided to get a hotel room for this trip vice our typical camping arrangements. It was a mighty fine start to the weekend. |
When it comes to where does this trail rate among the other iconic classics of this area like Gooseberry and Little Creek, Hurricane Rim/JEM etc... it is highly debatable and here is my two cents on the subject based on being an out-of-towner who has to make Hurricane/St George a multiday roadtrip to ride here. Gooseberry is the most of iconic mesa ride out here and if anyone in your group has not ridden Gooseberry it should be on the multi-day ride menu. If you are all veterans of Gooseberry, then either Little Creek or Guacmole should be done. If I had three days of riding available, I would shoot to do two of the three. If I had four days available, I might just hit up all three. Then again there are plenty of other rides in the area beyond mesa top riding. It is a good problem to have. |
