Amasa Back

The trail name Hymasa looks like standard trail-map wordplay, and it is not. Tyson Swasey, the Moab trail builder who cut the climbing route up to Captain Ahab, folded a memorial into it: Jonny Hymas, a pioneer of the Moab bike scene and longtime manager of Moab Cyclery, was killed in a car accident in late December 2011, and when the trails were completed in March 2014 his surname had been fused with Amasa. The mesa itself is a slickrock peninsula wrapped by the Colorado River and Kane Creek, 17 trails and 18.5 miles of singletrack, ledgy, exposed, and classic Moab.

The map traces those trails as they switchback up through the contours and run out along the rim. The contour lines pile up hard where the mesa drops to the river, showing the cliff bands that make the exposure real, then loosen across the top where the slickrock rolls. You can follow Ahab’s line down the drainage and see exactly why it descends the way it does.