Reverting to winter

 

Anyone who has lived in northern New England for a while knows better than to put the shovel away before May. Maybe June up in Aroostook County, Maine.

The forecast for the storm moving in tonight and lasting into Saturday is for 4-8 inches of snow, with a lot of rain mixed in. The snow is good news for depleted ground water, because it hangs around and percolates in, rather than running off into streams and rivers, to make its way back to the ocean. There will be some of that, too, which is good news for lakes that had not ended the winter brimming with excess. Local rapids stopped rushing and were merely hurrying slightly, months before they were due to be so quiet.

Several inches of gloppy wet snow isn't such good news for biking. It will melt quickly, making the interruption brief. It's worse news for trail users, whether on the stone dust rec path or the constructed courses of mountain bike trails.

Back when we mountain biked on found surfaces, we rode on anything. The trails were mostly woods roads, what we referred to as "double singletrack" because the ruts created parallel courses that you could sometimes ride as separate entities. In many places, even though the road was wide enough for a truck, the surface was made of New England's signature jumble of rock, so it was plenty technical. We also rode on snow machine trails, wherever they were not routed over something that absolutely had to be frozen. Rotting ice, mud, wet rocks and logs were just routine challenges to the early season mountain biker. We came home chilled, wet, and grimy, as did our machines. Sometimes we would find motorized mud aficionados buried to the wheel tops -- or worse. As the trails dried out the surface would stiffen as it had been left. Users would then wear it down into dry season configuration just by negotiating the ruts and ridges of dried soil. Where the soil was sandy, some wetness helped compact it to make it easier to ride on.

Depending on when the snow retreated enough to make riding on trails possible at all, we would begin like this:

Then the bugs would come out.

Now, mountain biking groups of various levels of organization, from a few friends with hand tools and leaf blowers, to non-profits small and large, go to lengthy trouble and expense to construct courses that they are understandably protective of. Trails will be closed due to mud. As much as road biking was being called "the new golf" a few years ago because of all the rich lawyer types getting into it, mountain biking is much more the new golf, with its $4,000-$10,000 machines and professionally constructed courses. We road riders still just go out on whatever we find, and can have a completely satisfying experience on a bike that's 40 years old. Just not in the next few days.

Fat bikers will chuckle indulgently. I suppose it's a tortoise and hare situation: they can go out and maintain their 7 mph every day, come what may, and rack up more distance than riders who wait for firm conditions and go faster for less time. Probably not, though. And if you want to have a fat bike in the lineup just for the conditions at which it does the best, you end up investing in a bulky bike that needs to be housed when you're not using it, and transported to the riding venue if you don't hop on the pedals right from home every time. Even eBay deals started out as something some idiot paid full retail for, somewhere. Chances are, you'll throw down $1,000 and more -- sometimes a lot more -- for your blimp-tired bomber.