Minus Ten Review- 10

This is what snow in Winter looks like. Same week ten years ago.

Ten years ago on the blog here I was riding 29"ers in the snow and it was working fine and it was fun! Packed down snow in 30°F temperatures with Sun shining brightly. Had I had a fat bike it would have been totally awesome.

Fun fact: No one was riding bikes out of doors in 2007. I had the outside to myself back then. It is great to see that, at least in this one way, fat bikes have changed attitudes about Winter cycling.

The other thing here I note is that I am running a triple crank set. No one does that in 2017. Well, in the general sense, and that's not because triple crank sets are "bad". Misunderstood? Maybe. Not applicable to "modern geometry"? Probably. Not offered due to one component giant's stranglehold on patents which lock the workable tech away from being used by anyone else? Totally.

That tire set, the GEAX Saguaro, actually had a pretty stellar tread pattern for snow. It would be interesting to see something similar in a current fat bike sized tire. Trouble is that 4 inches of tread blocks across a fat tire would weigh a lot! So, this will likely never happen.

This would be one of the last rides I would do on the Haro Mary. It was about that time I realized it was just too small, and I had other bikes coming and going in the rotation which worked a lot better. I'll say it again- I should have gotten the size Large! Dang it! Live and learn.......

Still one of Salsa Cycles best ever paint schemes in my opinion.

Then there was the Thule T2 I bought to haul the fairly new to me Salsa Cycles Dos Niner down to El Paso with. This would be my first rodeo riding down there. I was super stoked to try those 29"er wheels out on a real mountain.

The Thule T2 is probably the forerunner of all the racks you see now similar to it. There are a lot of them that are better now, but this design has aged well. I am on my second one now. This one in the image rusted out living on the back of our vehicles.

The Dos, well, I'll get around to talking about that more in a future "Minus Ten Review" post. For now I will say that it was a favorite in the stable in 2007 up to this point. Back then Salsa was using Scandium enhanced aluminum alloy. It was supposed to be lighter, and it was pretty light, but there were some other issues with it that cropped up down the trail.

Anyway, the image of the Dos on the back of our then vehicle signaled the beginning of Spring Break. That is still happening ten years down the road, and if you are one that is going somewhere, or is somewhere now for the week, have a good one!