Gooseberry Mesa was my first ride on slickrock ride. The trailhead for the mesa is located just outside Hurricane UT about 2hr 45min from Las Vegas and 4hrs 45 min from Salt Lake City. On the Mountain Bike Project website they say: “Gooseberry Mesa is 
a world class trail. It’s one of the best technical trails anywhere with rolling slickrock, twisty singletrack, and vistas to die for.” With that kind of description we had to go there and do some riding.
My trip started with a flight to Salt Lake City for an American Mountain Guide Association meeting. There I met with Rob Coppolillo and after the meeting we drove to the trailhead. We started the ride just after 3pm, pretty late for October 30th. So Rob and I started by doing the South Rim Trail then Hidden Canyon finally the Secret Trail back to the car. The ride we did was 17.5 miles long which took us 3hrs and 45 min to complete. We finished the last 20 minutes by headlamp.
The riding was cross country style and although there isn’t any real up or down the trails go over rough rolling terrain so there are
short technical ups and downs throughout the ride. Instead of trying to describe the riding here are a few videos to give you a taste.
As per usual here is the geopdf map, gpx, and kml file so you can have the navigation info for the area. The map is is from utahmountainbiking.com and I geo referenced it onto Caltopo so you can import it into Avenza and have it sync with your phones gps and you’ll get a blue dot at your location.
Gooseberry GPX of our ride
(Some browsers add a .xml extension, delete the .xml leaving only the .gpx extension before saving)
Gooseberry KML of our ride