With a Monday free of family and work commentments, I loaded the snow bike up in the truck and headed out to the White Mountains NRA. The trailhead was largely empty, besides a ranger from BLM who was unloading his snow machine. I unloaded the bike, let Remus out, and headed off to go have some fun.
The trail was a bit soft, but ridable.
It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, though a bit breezy at times. Several weeks of snow and wind have made an interesting snowscape..
By the end of the day it was pretty windy on the hills, with a fair bit of blowing snow. It was fairly warm, perhaps 15f or so, so it was not cold, and very beautiful.
Wind in the Whites from J C on Vimeo.
I ended up biking about 30 miles in 6 hours or so – so nothing particularly epic nor fast, but a wonderful way to spend the afternoon. The trail softened up quite a bit in the late afternoon and I ended up pushing a fair bit, but it was not the end of the world to push for a while.
This was my first long day trip with my new 100mm Flattop rear wheel. I got this rear wheel built up for cabin trips and so for it has been a bit of a mixed bag – they add quite a bit of float in really soft conditions, but the price you pay for this is a fair bit of extra rolling resistance. They also are a bit tricky to get the bead seated on them correctly. It took me several tries to get the tire mounted on them in a somewhat round manner with the seated fairly evenly on the rim – not really the experience you would expect from a $120 rim.. I ended up gluing the most troublesome side down as with the loose fit I was not confident that they would not slip when I was running low pressures. Also a bit disappointing – perhaps my 70mm UMA IIs from speedway have spoiled me, but it should be unnecessary to glue tires on these days.
Tags: goofing off, mondays, snow biking, white mountains
And now, with an video!