Moab USA - cowboy film panoramas, awesome riding and dinosaur footprints. Pictures by Bancoora.com.

Most of my international riding has been undertaken in the USA due to my brother being located in Denver. It's a great spot for mountain biking.

While you can readily hire high quality bikes, If you're going to be doing a lot of riding, I'd recommend taking your own. This is because it costs A$80 to A$100 per day to hire a good bike so the costs add up pretty quickly and it saves you constantly returning to the hire shops if you want to do a remote ride and want to move on after. Further, Qantas allows for two pieces of checked baggage of 23 kg each. The website is totally unclear on whether a bike qualifies as it is categorised as sporting equipment and the bike boxes are over the linear dimension limits quoted. Further investigation with Qantas reveals that, if a standard bike box is used ($25 from Qantas but you can BYO), you can carry it for free to the first USA port of call. Be wary about further internal legs in the USA however as they will typically cost A$150 per leg.

You can ship your bike separately from your flight as well - Bike Flights is one such option.

Car hire is cheap. I recently hired an Avis vehicle for 16 days for A$800 with unlimited kilometres. I managed to get 6000 kms in in that time so a bargain. One way rentals are a bit more expensive but can be a good option (eg fly to Denver or Salt Lake City and work your way back to LA or San Francisco). Just be prepared for the upsell when you get there (Mercedes instead?, satellite radio, GPS, etc).

Another good tip is to take a tablet or phone with Google Maps and download the maps before you go of the areas you are going to travel. No data charges and full access to maps including search functionality while in remote areas. Fantastic!

New Zealand	Some ideas from across the ditch. Plenty of MTB and cycle trail options in NZ.
REI USA MTB Trail Database	This is the duck's nuts of trail databases in the USA and was put together by REI - an outdoors gear company. Has trail information, GPS functionality, popularity rankings, trail user comments, etc. Extremely useful for a USA trail campaign. Download the app to your phone but make sure to also download the trail data for offline use as it allows for remote area use.
Moab Utah	Some information from a trip to Moab - this place is amazing and a must do. Hundreds of kilometres of trails in spectacular countryside. Ride the slickrock, cruise under mesas and plummet down into the Colorado River canyon.
Fruita Colorado	Have ridden the Bookcliffs area of this district but weather prevented riding the other trails. Like Moab, this place has lots of trails to explore in a number of different areas with different styles of trails on and below the mesa rims.

Moab	Click on link for map showing how to get there.
Fruita	Click on link for map showing how to get there.

	For Moab, refer to Moab Tourist Information Centre website. For Fruita, refer to Go Fruita website.