Antelope Island Moonlight Ride, July 5, 2012

We decided to try something new when we heard about this published moonlight ride on Antelope Island. The ride was supposed to start at 10 pm, when we were supposed to ride from the start of the island and ride about 11 plus miles to the Ranch on the southeast end of the island.  We decied to start our ride at 7:45 pm so that we would be in the light on the ride to the ranch.

These are avocets and gulls on the edge of the Great Salt Lake.

At the start of the ride about half-way up the first hill we saw this sign, "(buffalo) stay on the road."  We wondered if the buffalo could read!

I even got into the act.

Walt shows the flat part of the road and the lake.

Here he is showing just one of the rock formations on the island.

More road scenes with the mountains in the background.

Walt is using his bike for a chair.

Jim and Walt are on a pretty striated rock.

Some other early riders stopped to shoot all three of us on the rock.

Ha!  The wonderful buffalo herd is shown in the distance on the meadow.

This is a close-up and a cropped shot of the buffalo herd.

Here we all are in the meadow.

This gives you an idea of how far away those buffalo are!

Just before the ranch we saw a beautiful cloud with sunset color in the east.

This proves we made it to the ranch.

Someone changed some setting on the camera and made this weird shot.  Walter really liked the pyramid mountain over our heads in the background.

It was really dark when we shot these photos of deer in the ranch pasture.  However use your imagination.

This is another nearly dark scene on the ranch looking west toward the mountains.

This is from the ranch looking eat toward the mainland.

When we arrivedf back at the Jeep at nearly 11 pm, we saw a large group of cyclists just arriving to START their ride.

They look quite shost-like, don't they!

We really had the "adventure" on the ride back from the ranch in the dark! First of all a deer ran across the road between me and walt as we started back.  Then we encountered over a thousand cyclists on the road riding toward the ranch.  The only trouble was that they were riding very fast and were taking up both sides of the road, forcing us several times to ride on the gravel shoulder!  We also saw a lady rider take a bad fall as she rode down a hill with a large group.  We were sure glad that we were not riding with the main group and had decided to ride it early!