When We Used To Get Snow

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

We missed that big snow storm last weekend and since then it has just been really cold. No snow to speak of, certainly not enough to do Winter sports, and too cold to just be outside riding in the country. It is kind of a "worst case scenario" type of thing. Give me 20 more degrees and I don't care. I could ride a lot in cooler weather. But having to bundle up to go out for an hour in sub-zero temperatures? With NO SNOW? It's really hard to handle mentally.

Black Hawk Creek, The Green Belt, 2009.

It wasn't always this way. We used to get "regular" Winters with months of snow that would be great for all sorts of activities. The Winter of 2000-2001 was spectacular. I recall snow shoeing in four to five feet of snow in Hickory Hills park then. 

We would normally get chased off the mountain biking trails after Thanksgiving by a snow storm. It then might have taken a few weeks to build up a base of snow deep enough to cross country ski on, but generally then it would last until March. 

I used to write about XC skiing here fairly often back then. I was never really very good at it, but I found it to be a great way to burn off some steam when Winter was driving me nuts and keeping me off the bicycle. 

There were no fat bikes, no groomers, nothing....

These also were the days before turnkey fat bikes were available. Sure, if you were an ultra-cycling nerd and knew of Winter cycling in Alaska, maybe you knew about fat bikes, but they were an anomaly, extremely expensive, and very difficult to get parts for. (That fat bike specific stuff, that is.) 

I usually had to break my own trail back then too.

A Soul Cycles Dillinger I used as a 'pseudo-fat bike' with 29" X 2.4" tires.

I recall thinking how great it would be to have a bike with those 3.8" Endomorph tires and a frame to fit them. Then Surly showed their fat bike, the Pugsley, and I was smitten. Then, as we all probably know here, Salsa Cycles came out with their Mukluk model and I was on my way. 

With a little help from a bunch of friends, of course. My birthday in 2011 was marked by a birthday present funded by several folks of that Mukluk fat bike. And that unleashed a completely new era in my cycling. 

Ironically the Winter of 2010 -2011 was one of the last good, long, snowy Winters we've had. Since then we've had a month, or even just a week or two, of 'fat bikeable' weather. It's been very strange indeed. And XC Skiing? Ha! I haven't had those boards out for well over ten years. 

Winter sure ain't what it used to be around these parts.