November Rides

[north woods gal]

I do use pull over crampons over my boots to walk the trails in the winter when things get really treacherous and, of course, they're built in to my snowshoes. Kind of clunky, though. Might look into those micro spikes. Sounds like a great idea.

The fat bikes aren't 100% slip proof, of course. Still have to know how to take tight turns and so on when fat biking on the slick stuff. Also, when things get nightmare bad, I do have two fat bikes set up and ready to go with studded tires. One is for hard pack snow and clean ice. Has shallow lugs to keep more surface area close to the snow pack/ice. Runs very fast. The other is a deep-lugged monster for chewing though the deep, slushy stuff, but it's a slow beast to run.

Oh, yeah, tire styles and setting the right tire psi to match the conditions is a much needed skill for fat biking. These tires run at very low psi, typically 5 or even a touch less in the winter to about 10 or 12 for the max in the summer, so even one or two psi makes a huge difference in the way the tire performs. Regular bike tire gauges aren't accurate enough, either, so I use a special low psi gauge that only goes up to 30 psi. Even have to be careful to wait until the tires cools to air temperature in cold weather before measuring pressure. Tires will lose pressure going from a warm house to winter cold. Go too low and you get a pinch flat when running with inner tubes. Another reason I'm going tubeless when I can with the fatties.

Okay, more than anyone probably wanted to know about fat bikes, but they really are different. I'll shut up, now.