Winter Ride musings

Hah I loved how you said fun fun fun at the end of that. Doesn't sound
like my cup of tea, but I did do my first bit of real snow muni today
aswell. It was a fairly different ride from yours but I did have a few
similar issues.

It was mostly powder except where the skiers had packed down paths
through the trails.

At first I was riding (or trying to) pretty much everywhere but I
quickly realized that with the short cranks I was putting too much
power into everything and I was slipping all over the place, if I
leaned forward at all to accelerate the wheel would just spin like
mad.

The downhills were different though, much easier infact. I could go
through the powder (at this point only about 6-10 inches deep) without
any problems and infact it would kind of help me stay in control by
slowing me down, this was until I had to do tight turns, I was fine on
the first one then the second turn would send me slipping and flying
into some trees (although it was pretty fun smashing into them).

In the packed down snow though, it was similar to your experience with
ice. I would be riding along then all of a sudden it would slope off to
one side, or it would turn into a powder hole and I would sink in or
spin out.

The other thing that was hard was riding on anything on an angle, I
could ride straight up slopes (if I got some momentum first which
wasn't easy) and I could ride down them, but riding with them was
nearly impossible unless I was immediatly turning into them.

I found one particularly rocky area that was nice and packed down and
despite it being covered with snow it was still rideable. I had ridden
this area once before on my muni and it was a bit of a challenge then,
but this time I was a bit more gutsy and found that as long as I kept
my speed up and never tried to speed up or slow down I was fine.

One of the biggest things that I found with snow is that you need to
keep your speed constant, it is when you accelerate or decelerate that
you will have issues.

Now I really want to try some 8 inch deep powder riding downhill. I got
a couple small tastes of it and it was alot of fun, so bring it on!

Another thing is that it would have been nice to have some longer
cranks on the 26er, even some 150's would have helped.

--
ntappin

'how to build a strong comfy saddle from junk.'
(http://tinyurl.com/hxcb3)
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