If you think Park City’s Point to Point race of 75 miles and 10,000 vertical feet in a day is grueling – multiply that by four and you’ll know what’s in store with the Uinta Bike Packing race.
Charlotte and Matthew Turner are both former professional road and mountain bike racers who now enjoy what’s called bike packing – doing ultra long distances on a bike carrying everything that’s needed for the journey.
Charlotte came up with a preliminary route a couple of years ago that starts in Park City, travels up Wolf Creek pass and heads east as far as Duchesne before looping back to Park City. Along the way, riders will pass the Jordanelle, Strawberry and Starvation reservoirs.
“It's over 300 miles of single track, back roads, not much paved roads, which we like,” Charlotte said. “And there's a lot that's involved in this route, knowing what spots have good water, because we also don't want to make a route that people struggle with. We want to make it fun and exciting and see all the new places they haven't seen.”
The specific dates have not yet been determined, but the plan is to stage the race in September 2026. Since the race will be self-supporting, Matthew said the plan is not to charge a registration fee.
“A lot of times when you're asking for profit and registration, the forest service will ask for a more amount of payment towards them as well for different permits. because you're more like a for income event,” Matthew explained. “So, it's just for the community. We're not really doing it to make any money. We just want to put out a route out there and have our friends and everyone else who's interested join and kind of learn something new.”
Besides having the right mindset, he said participants will also have to have a satellite tracking device.
"There's a lot of parts of the course where there's no cell service or anything like that. So having that (satellite device), you can message someone you know and have them assist you if you need to get rescued. Otherwise, you have the final resource of the SOS button," he said.
For the hard-core competitive racers, Matthew said they will probably finish the race without sleeping for a couple of days, carrying only enough food and water to survive. Others, he said, will treat it like a backpacking trip.
“The majority of the people aren't going to be the people at the front being very minimal and just pushing through the night, they're going to bring sleeping pads, sleeping bag, a tent, and just camp out at night and ride during the day and make it a kind of a similar to backpacking, but everything's strapped to your bike,” he said.
Charlotte thinks a mountain bike will probably work better than a gravel bike, as the course is rugged and the last part of it will climb the WOW trail. The final route, she said, will be posted on the website this fall.
