Rear View 2021: Part 1 - Winter's End

One of the first headers in 2021 for the blog from January

 Hello! it's time again to review the year on Guitar Ted Productions. The "Rear View" has been a staple of the blog since almost the very beginning. This year there will be five Rear View posts looking back on Winter's End, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter's Beginning. I'll also have a post looking ahead at 2022 near the end of the month. Enjoy the look back and thanks for reading Guitar Ted Productions!

January kicked off in a snowy, cold way here at Guitar Ted Productions. Things were slow at work so I was not working and I had a lot of time to spend fat biking. The bike of choice for this part of the year was the Blackborrow DS. 

Of course, we were still deep in the throes of the pandemic. How things would look later in the year were still a mystery, but vaccines were said to be on the horizon. How would those alter the landscape of cycling and my personal life was yet to be seen. Meanwhile I contemplated not doing anything socially again. I did, however, sign up for Gravel Worlds, but at the time I was ready to not go again if things were still not safe, in my view. 

The snow for fat biking in early 2021 was about as good as it ever gets here.

 The cold deepened and at times it was just too much for me to get out and ride. In those times I had 'projects' I set up for myself. the most ambitious and successful one being the 'townie' conversion of that old barn-built Trek frame. I combined some old Dura Ace hubs with some NOS Salsa Delgado rims for the single speed wheel set and combed the Lab for other spares to get the build up and running by February.

There was actually a bit of a January thaw here and I was able to scoot out for a short gravel ride near the end of the month, but then the cold settled back in again with copious amounts of snow. This snow being the rare, 'good-for-fat biking' snow. The Blackborow DS got a LOT of ride time during February.

Deep cold insured that I had plenty of shop time. Here's a bit of a headset resto I did for my townie project.

 On the blog I ran my annual "State of the Gravel Scene" posts, I continued on with the "Trans Iowa Stories" series, and I did a mini-series called "Beginners on Gravel", or 'B.O.G.' for short. That last series was pretty popular here and actually was picked up and re-published on my friend, Grannygear's site. Review items kept showing up for RidingGravel.com, and Andy and I kept the podcast ball rolling from 2020 right on into 2021. At the end of February I posted an article describing what I think is a good gravel bike geometry and what I think is not. 

By the end of February the weather had broke and Winter was quickly getting kicked out of the door. Next I'll take a look at Spring and what happened along the way in those months as it concerns this blog. Stay tuned!