Moab guide Mike Smith marks 250 White Rim Trail rides

Mike Smith reached his 250th White Rim ride with coworkers waiting at the final climb, a fitting finish for an 80-year-old Moab guide whose life has been built around one of Canyonlands National Park’s most exacting loops. The milestone said as much about the place as it did about Smith: the White Rim still rewards riders who understand its scale, respect its hazards and keep coming back.

Smith first rode the 100-mile route in the mid-1980s, after heading west to bike, hang glide and climb. A 1990 car crash changed the shape of his life, but it did not pull him away from the desert. He rebuilt around backcountry mountain-bike guiding and spent decades returning to the same road, finding in the White Rim a mix of challenge, solitude and spectacle that never seemed to wear out.

That is the part first-timers often miss. The White Rim is not a quick Moab checkbox. It is a 100-mile loop around and below the Island in the Sky mesa top, with steep, exposed sections that demand judgment as much as fitness: Shafer Trail, Lathrop Canyon Road, Murphy Hogback, Hardscrabble Hill and the Mineral Bottom switchbacks. The National Park Service says day-use permits are required for bicycles, and they go online at 8 a.m. Mountain Time the day before a trip.

The route’s conditions can change fast. High water on the Green River can flood the west side and make a complete loop impossible, and the park says once the river exceeds 17,000 cubic feet per second, flooding is likely in several places. Recreation.gov says half of the day-use permits are available in person on a first-come, first-served basis, while overnight permits are especially competitive in spring and fall. On White Rim, planning is part of the ride.

Smith’s milestone also landed in a landscape with a deeper backstory than most visitors realize. The Moab Museum says the Atomic Energy Commission built nearly 1,000 miles of road in southeast Utah to encourage uranium prospecting, including roads in and around Canyonlands. The White Rim emerged from that era as an iconic off-road and mountain-biking destination, now drawing nearly 20,000 visitors a year. Rim Tours, which dates to 1985 and calls itself Moab’s original mountain-bike outfitter, came up alongside that shift in local adventure culture.

By the time Smith’s coworkers gathered at the final climb, the number beside his name mattered less than the route behind it. Two hundred fifty laps later, the White Rim still looks like what it has always been: a hard road, a big view and a place that keeps asking riders to learn it the right way.