Mushy

All those tracks are deer tracks. They were busy down there!

Monday I rode to work in perhaps the last of the negative digit temps for the Winter. Oh......there could be another time for that yet, but the Sun is getting up higher in the sky and the Sun's rays are warming things up little by little. Spring is not far off......

We had a big dump of snow last Friday and the hope was that it would bring back the good times for fat biking. I went out with my snow shoes Sunday to beat in a bit of a path for my commute, but the bindings broke about ten minutes after I started. Anyway, it was a largely fruitless effort anyway. This snow is sooooo unconsolidated. About seven inches of sugar-snow is what it ended up being. Absolute mush.

But that didn't deter me from trying to take the long way home on Monday. The ride in wasn't very encouraging. I had to walk a lot of my "off-pavement" sections. Even the unplowed parking lot was only doable because some yahoos had been in there whipping doughnuts so I had some car/truck tire tracks to follow.

Going home the "long way" I ran into a lot of shifting, sand-like snow that saw me going a few feet then washing out the front tire. Or if that wasn't the case it was the severely "post-holed by walkers" snow that bounced me off into the more unconsolidated mush and coming to a halt.

Frustrating?

Very!

This was in the middle of a long stretch of pushing the bike.

Later into the ride I managed to pull off a stretch of riding in the snow only because the wind had blown off enough of the sugar that I could see blades of grass sticking through the mushy mess. Any deeper than this and the tires simply would not float. They would simply sink in and the bike was unrideable. It was akin to trying to ride on "thick water". Sinking was more the rule of the day than floating was.

It seems as though this snow will be gone soon enough and I am completely fine with that. The temps today are suppose to be into the 40 degree range and many subsequent days look to be above freezing with the exception of Friday which is going to be like yesterday, around 17°F for a high. But that's an outlier for the coming two weeks. We are supposed to be above freezing more often than not, and then it will be March. Fat bikes will be getting less of my attention very soon and the gravel bikes will be hitting the roads here.

I'm ready for it..........