Ride the Whole Enchilada to its traditional finish and you already know the moment. You drop off Porcupine Rim with your hands loose from six thousand feet of descending, and then the trail runs out. What's left is a few hundred yards of Highway 128 shoulder, no barrier, traffic doing highway speed, riders funneling onto pavement they'd rather not be on. For as long as most current residents have lived here, that merge was just the toll you paid for riding the classic line back into town.
A different kind of gap has sat on the other end of the spectrum. Slickrock, sand, exposed ledges: that's been the entire menu for anyone learning to ride here, riding with kids, or riding with a body that doesn't move the way it used to. Moab built its reputation on technical rock. It never built much of anything else.
This year both of those absences are closing, in two different corners of Grand County, for two different sets of riders. Neither project is finished. Both are far enough along that they're already changing what a normal week on a bike looks like here.
A Trail System With No Rock In It
Mud Springs sits about 12 miles south of town in Spanish Valley, on Bureau of Land Management land that straddles the Grand and San Juan county line. BLM flagged the area as a mountain biking focus zone back in 2008. It took most of two decades, and a working partnership between BLM, Grand County, San Juan County, and the Utah Division of Outdoor Recreation, to actually get dirt moving.
Trail crews only get a narrow construction window each year, August 1 through November 14, to avoid disturbing migratory birds. That schedule is why phase one opened in pieces: a soft preview in November 2025, a seasonal closure from December 1 through April 15 to protect wintering mule deer and elk, then a full reopening on April 16, 2026 with roughly seven of the phase's planned 9.75 miles rideable.
What's on the ground is the real surprise. The soil at Mud Springs carries enough clay content that machine-built berms actually hold their shape, something the sand and slickrock everywhere else in Moab won't allow. Grades rarely top 6 percent. There isn't a rock ledge to clear anywhere on the system. Riders climb a route called U235, descend RADium or Yellowcake Walk, and connect between them on a link called Geiger Grind, names that lean into the area's mining history instead of pretending it away.
Built For Riders Moab Used To Turn Away
The bigger change isn't the berms. It's who the trail was designed for before anyone broke ground.
For close to two decades, adaptive riders coming to Moab worked with retrofits: bottlenecks widened after the fact, corners reshaped years after a trail was first cut. Mud Springs was built the other direction, with adaptive specs set before construction started:
- Tread width of 40 to 48 inches, noticeably wider than Moab's typical singletrack, which is usually bike-width only
- No pinch point narrower than 43 inches anywhere on the system
- Switchback radii of at least 15 feet
Kirk Williams, a Durango rider who became quadriplegic in 2009 and rides a handcycle, described his first lap at Mud Springs this way:
"I feel entirely comfortable going out there and riding solo knowing what I'm getting into ahead of time."
That's not a small thing in a town where solo laps for handcycle riders used to mean waiting at tight spots for another rider to come along and help push through.
What's Still Coming
Phase one is expected to wrap by fall 2026. Phase two, planned for 2027, adds another ten miles, including downhill-specific trail with jumps that the current system doesn't attempt, according to Grand County project manager Tyson Swasey. The trailhead was built with events in mind, too: a seven-acre parking lot large enough to host youth racing, something the popular Moab Brand Trails can't accommodate. The Utah Cycling League is already planning a NICA race there, the first youth mountain bike event the area has hosted in several years.
None of that is open if you're reading this in late August. Mud Springs closes annually on December 1 and doesn't reopen until April 15, so anyone mapping out a fall riding rotation south of town needs to plan around that window rather than assume it away.
A Different Kind of Gap, A Few Miles North
The second change sits on the opposite end of a local rider's week. On April 28, 2026, Governor Spencer Cox and Utah Department of Transportation officials gathered at Lions Park to break ground on the Colorado River Trail Gap project, a 0.7-mile paved connection along Highway 128 near the Grandstaff Canyon trailhead. It closes the exact stretch that's been dumping Whole Enchilada riders onto the highway shoulder for years, and it's the first project to reach construction under Utah's statewide Trail Network, a plan Cox and UDOT unveiled in 2022 to link the state's roughly 500 miles of existing trail with another 2,600 miles of new paved connections.
Construction started with traffic control on March 9, 2026, and the corridor has been running one lane with alternating signals since, with delays reported up to 15 minutes and restrictions expected to last as long as 300 days. UDOT is targeting completion by February 2027. Once it's done, the cyclists and pedestrians who use this stretch of the Colorado River Pathway, an annual figure UDOT has put at around 30,000 as of 2021, won't need to touch the highway at all to get from Grandstaff Canyon back into town.
| Before 2026 | Status as of August 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Riding options south of town | Slickrock and sand only, no machine-built flow trail | Mud Springs open mid-April through November, phase one about 9.75 miles |
| Finishing the Whole Enchilada | Highway shoulder merge near Grandstaff Canyon | Construction underway on 0.7-mile connector, one-lane traffic control, completion targeted February 2027 |
What Changes For a Normal Week
For someone who already lives here, the practical shift right now is smaller than the press releases make it sound. The highway gap is under construction, which means the ride back from Porcupine Rim is arguably more of a hassle this year than last, not less, until the one-lane signal comes down. The upside is a fixed date to plan around instead of an open-ended hazard.
Mud Springs is the more immediate change. It gives Moab something it didn't have before: an easy option close enough for an after-work lap that doesn't involve technical rock or a drive out to Fruita or Sedona for flow trail. It also gives riders who couldn't safely ride Moab's existing trail system a real option, not a workaround someone rigged up after the fact.
Neither project changes what Moab is known for. Porcupine Rim is still Porcupine Rim. The slickrock trail is still the slickrock trail. What's changed is that for the first time in a long while, those aren't the only two options on the map, and the most dangerous part of the classic loop finally has a completion date attached to it instead of just being accepted as part of the ride.
Changes like these rarely show up in a listing description, but they shape how a property actually lives day to day, whether that's proximity to a trailhead, drive time to Spanish Valley, or how a home sits relative to Highway 128. Nikole Andersen Real Estate tracks this kind of shift in Moab and Castle Valley as part of understanding what a place is actually like to live in, not just what it's listed for. If you're weighing a move here or want a straight read on a specific property, contact Nikole for a complimentary market consultation.
