Good for nothing weather

 

 Wow! It's porn outside!

 Rain drummed on the roof. I heard the ice on the steep part shift as it moved closer to the edge. The temperature was 50 degrees (F), as it had been all night and for much of the previous day. The splashes in the driveway burst up almost on top of each other. What had been an almost unbroken layer of ice and compacted snow had turned to mud, except where it hadn't. As the temperature falls today, the remaining ice will set back up for the weekend. Within an hour, the sun had started to come out, but the air was still warm, and water flowed steadily from the roof.

This is Presidents' Day Weekend, the opening weekend of Massachusetts school vacation week. This is traditionally the biggest moneymaking period for New England ski areas if they didn't have a big Christmas week. Cross-country ski areas can't count on a big Christmas week the way downhill areas that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars -- or millions -- on snowmaking can. Our overhead is much lower, but we're at the mercy of the weather. In the past couple of decades, that weather has been increasingly merciless.

It all freezes up again this afternoon, but the damage is done. The trail system has been cut in too many places. The sections with usable snow are cut off by either bare ground or plates of ice that the tiller on the grooming machine can't reconstitute.

The fat bikers always pipe up about now to try to tell us that they are the answer. I will wearily dismantle that claim again as necessary. For instance: we might rent 30 or 40 sets of skis on a busy day. There is no way we could keep a fleet of 30 or 40 fat bikes. And our ski rental fleet is much larger than 30-40 sets. We have more than twice that many. The estimate of 30-40 pairs is a bit conservative. On a really crazy day we'll clear the rack and re-rent stuff wet to latecomers who are remarkably willing to put on boots that literally just came off of some stranger's sweaty feet.

The trail system can absorb far more skiers than bikers, as well. Skiers are much better equipped to slither past each other in a congested area, compared to rigid bicycles with 31-inch handlebars. So even if we flung the gates open wide and invited the bulbous crowd to cavort, it could look like the stampede scene from some movie about a cattle drive of longhorns.

Then there's cost: fat bikers who own their own will have shelled out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 to $2,000 for their mounts, assuming that about half of them picked up a used one from some other rider who realized that it was more of an encumbrance than an asset and cut their losses. You can pay a lot more. In contrast, a new ski touring outfit costs about $400.You'll pay $400 just for studded tires for your fat bike. Used stuff is almost as hard to find as new stuff with the ongoing pandemic disruptions, but if you do find something it could be quite cheap. And skis just lean quietly in a corner when you're not getting to use them. They take up little more room than a furled umbrella.

Snowshoeing remains an option, but the popular perception of snowshoeing is weird. A snowshoe is just a boat to float you on the snow. The size is calculated to keep you from slogging in your bare boots, anywhere from knee deep to waist deep. The addition of traction devices to the bottom is more recent, to make traversing hard frozen sections safer and more convenient. But once "snowshoeing" became a discrete activity performed for its own sake, rather than as part of the general category of winter hiking, people started using them on shallow snow and firm frozen trails that most of us with experience in winter hiking would see as just good footing without the encumbrance of snowshoes. Lots of rock and ice, and irregular ground, takes a toll on snowshoes. They're designed to be supported by a fairly uniform resistance from the snow beneath them.

In the "anything for a buck" mentality of winter rental, upper management will still say, "well, you can snowshoe," but anyone experienced already knows better. You will be better served to use Microspikes or a similar device. We don't rent those. Maybe we should.

Just on the basis of canceled reservations, we've lost hundreds of dollars. That may not seem like much in a world that considers an operation with 500 employees to be a "small business." but in the realm of really small businesses like ours, it's somebody's paycheck for a week. Along with that go retail sales we might have made from the group when they visited the shop to get their rentals or drop them off, and losses to other businesses in town if most of the prospective visitors decide not to come here at all. And we lose the walk-ins and same-day last minute reservation calls we typically get on a Saturday or Sunday morning. There aren't enough fat bikers in the world to equal that head count.

Indoor trainers laugh indulgently. They may not even look out a window from November to March. The super cool computerized systems feed them the virtual experience at whatever level they can afford to simulate. But indoor training depends on fantasy life. If you're like me, and have no fantasy life anymore, indoor training is just torment. All that ever propelled me through periods of indoor training were bright daydreams of the myriad ways I was going to use that fitness on pleasurable challenges.

I do look forward to commuting season. Driving sucks. But it's hard to maintain a lot of trainer enthusiasm just based on that. I can nip out for a few base mile rides when actual commuting season seems imminent, and be good to go. Maybe I'll get on the rollers a couple or three times for old times' sake before that.

'S no storm

 Yeah, so the big snowstorm didn't happen. I think of the shovel as a good luck charm, same as the shovel and brush in the car. If I have them, I won't need them. Put them away and change to summer tires, and we'll get hit with a load of classically slippery spring snow.

It's magical thinking. The weather doesn't care. But it's one of those superstitious observances that you might know is bullshit, but you do it anyway. And it worked this time. Some places got upwards of ten inches, but not around here.

An article on the New Hampshire Public Radio website, talking about young activists and climate change, stated that in the warming conditions, New Hampshire "will have shorter winters." Wrong. Winter will still be the same length, even if it is milder and generally more wet than white. Day length will not change. What tree species thrive will still lose their leaves for months. There will just be less to enjoy about the dreary trudge through the long nights. We'll still get plenty of raw, wet weather. It sounds a lot like what we just went through.

Decades ago I was in North Carolina at a week-long conservation seminar. We learned that the higher summits of the southern mountains had a climate like New England's. As you went up in elevation it was the equivalent of going hundreds of miles north. I don't remember the exact ratio, but it held true on up the Blue Ridge and northward until one reached the actual New England, where the alpine zone was like Baffin Island or something. Now the ecosystems are shifting, so that New England will end up like the Carolinas, and the southern highlands will end up as steamy rainforest with no treeline even on the highest summits.

Whatever happens, just try to dress for it as you set out on your bike.

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.

Winter Frustration

On Wednesday I arrived to begin my work week and found a road bike clamped in the work stand. With the persistent lack of snow, its owner had decided to begin riding outdoors. His timing wasn't very good. Late Wednesday night, snow began. It changed to sleet and freezing mist not long after sunrise. This transitioned to more significant icing after nightfall on Thursday. But he's ready if winter falters again.

Winter has mostly faltered this year. It has managed to dish up a tasting menu of wintry tidbits, including some skating and ice boating, but not a lot of any one winter pleasure. The snow last year, though below average, was dense and durable. The cold, though not bitter, was persistent enough to put together longer stretches of wild skating, and keep the ski trails just holding on. For your cross-training outdoor athletes of any level it provided a seasonally-appropriate selection much of the time. This year has been much more frustrating.

I used to switch readily to riding when I was already doing more consistent training of all kinds. Since I am the absolute worst at indoor exercise, I hardly did any, but I could always find something to do outside. However, as I've gotten older, I really notice how cycling alone does not provide complete enough exercise. It actually hurts you if all you do is pedal. It neglects too many other muscle groups and does nothing for bone density, flexibility, and core strength. A false start on riding season just makes me repeat saddle toughening multiple times before the real season sets in.

Road riding has one massive advantage: convenience. There's a road right at the end of your driveway. If you happen to live where there's a trail -- bike, hike, ski, or what have you -- right outside your door, that's great. But most of us don't have that. Okay, I do, but I know that it's not the norm in most places. But a road rider on any form of the machine can walk out, hop on, and pedal away. My winter choice is the fixed gear, but you have to develop a taste for that. The guy who brought his road bike in this week has a fixed-gear that I built for him, but he doesn't automatically think to go that way. He used to compete in triathlon at a high level, so his introduction to cycling was on sophisticated, multi-geared machines. He seemed to enjoy the fixie when we rode together a time or two, but it didn't win him over.

When riding season actually gets close I will start the routines of riding and supporting exercises. But riding has always fit my schedule best when I use it to commute to work, so that it eats less time out of the rest of my day. The supporting exercises are fairly minimal. When I can get on top of my seasonal depression, I do them even when I'm not riding. But if I can ski regularly it takes care of everything I need until early spring.

Cross-country skiing is the ultimate one-stop shopping for general fitness. It goes beyond the obvious cardiovascular benefits. Classical skiing especially works the limbs through a nice, full range of motion, while the core is exercised symmetrically in support of the stride. Skating is less satisfactory, but still better than anything else outside of a planned and varied program in a gym, using specific exercises to isolate muscle groups and boring the shit out of you until you quit. But you can't get up and go on your skis if the trails are brown, or if thin cover leaves subsurface obstacles that could dump you on your face.

Just trudging around on cross-country skis provides a muted level of the muscular benefits, but less of the cardiovascular aspect, unless you really go out and bulldoze on your heavier boards. You will get your heart rate up, but I find it hard to persist at that level when I'm not making much headway through the landscape. Also, groomed trails get chewed down to nothing when they're not refreshed with new snow at regular intervals, so your trudging is likely to be done off-trail. Mature hardwood forests offer many passable spaces. But it's now more of a hike than a swooping flight in pursuit of a sleek physique.

Even the trudging had started to suffer from the lack of a consistent surface. On a recent bushwhack up the mountain behind my house, I rediscovered the sensation of actually walking, when the steeper slopes turned out to have melted off. It was downright pleasant. The snow that fell Wednesday night won't improve the skiing enough up there, and it will make the walking harder. But that's New England. It might freshen up the smoothest of the groomable Nordic trails for a low-grade version of  the high-grade experience. And I might even get a shot at it before it turns into some other weird, half-frozen thing.

The obstinacy of people on wheels

The snow thrower quit on me this morning as I was beginning the most critical part of the job. I have to clear the end of the driveway and a landing zone so that I can get out to work this morning and have a place to bury the car when I return home this evening. Snow continues to fall, with up to eight inches forecast for the day.

Because humans have adopted the wheel as the universal facilitator of land travel, massive efforts have been made over the centuries to make wheeled conveyances more powerful, and surfaces more available. My friends in Alaska talk about road conditions, and the challenges of operating a motor vehicle in Arctic and near-Arctic conditions.

The town plow makes life miserable for those of us who move their own snow, and more expensive for  everyone. They make mobility possible in humanity's chosen way, but they build walls in front of driveways. If I could get around another way, I would forget the driveway and mothball the car for the winter. But many factors act against that.

This is relevant to cycling with the rise of fat bikes. Fat bikes can't break their own trail. They're lousy for bushwhacking. Fat bike riders are always looking for a packed surface to exploit. Some of them accept the challenge of packing their own trails, but as the user group expands it attracts more and more people who do not have that self sufficient ethic. They are fixated on using their expensive wheeled toy, and they push hard to be allowed on any existing packed surface. All they have to do to find peace is accept that wheels and snow were never meant to go together.

The rest of society cannot be weaned. In a place like New England, where snow is inconsistent, one winter might be white from end to end. Sleighs, snow machines, and skis would be great. But get a thaw, or have a dry or rainy winter and we're back to rolling. Most likely, get a winter that flips between the two extremes, and nothing works for long.

Today's blizzard will be followed by 40 degrees and rain by Thursday. That won't remove anything, it will just make it harder to deal with. It will be especially hard without the wheeled piece of power equipment that allows me to function at all.

In a perfect world...

Fresh out of college, with fantasies of creative success and a very realistic view of my financial position, I built my lifestyle around transportation cycling and small, sparsely furnished dwellings.

That was the plan, anyway.

Artists are always looking for ways to balance the basic needs of survival with the need to create. You have to be as persistent as a cockroach, and as adept at survival. Unfortunately, you will find yourself often about as welcome.

A brightly lit and prosperous world hung temptingly near in the 1980s. I kept letting myself get dragged into various safe harbors, more stray cat than cockroach. It exposed me to normal people, none of whom fell for my bicycling evangelism and suggestions that one could do a lot with a little, and still leave plenty for others to do the same.

A harsh wind blasts the landscape today. When the bike commute was a fairly short hop across a small and pleasant town, I would have done it without hesitation. In the original plan, I would travel from the town by bike or public transportation -- or even walk -- on journeys limited only by the funds I had accumulated to buy time and supplies. In the beginning, I had congenial friends who avidly joined in the imaginary voyages. Invariably, they fell away well short of actually launching any. As far as I know, nearly everyone with whom I rode in the 1980s rarely rides anymore. A good percentage don't ride at all. They outgrew it.

The potbound plant that is human civilization has outgrown a lot of things that might have saved it from the death by strangulation that its growth has set in motion.

Even here, in the rural North, I have made some heroic commutes by bike. But the darkest dark and iciest, snowiest snow encouraged me to take advantage of my foothold in normality to resort to the car. Bike commuting became seasonal, because I could. But in the perfect world, I never did.

In 1980, envisioning a system that would work for me, I had no urge to live in the country. I liked the country, but I know that it ceases to be rural when it fills up with people who want to be in it. My later move to the woods followed a logical series of steps -- half normal and half half-baked -- in which I rationalized that I could live in an existing building in a mostly undeveloped area, and help to preserve its environment while the rest of the world caught on to the need to do so on a large scale. But the simple bikey life was lost.

A perfect world, in which the residents live in small but comfortable spaces, in compactly developed centers surrounded by large tracts of natural environment, depends on good soundproofing. It depends on a lot of other things that are never going to happen, either. But soundproofing is vital. We can't cheap out on construction.

A perfect world also depends on a stable population. Because humans are like most species, designed to replicate freely and lose a lot to famine, disease, and predation, we will not achieve a stable population by peaceful, pleasant, and well-planned means. So again, the dream shimmers and fades. We are too smart and not smart enough.

We don't live in the perfect world. Things happen in the imperfect world that earn our love. There is no exit ramp to the alternate universe that doesn't require jettisoning things that have become dear. And there's really no such thing as a nice little town. Every Bedford Falls has a Potter. And the soundproofing is woefully inadequate. We don't live in the perfect world. But ideas from it could make this one better. Bike and walk. Adjust development strategies to make best use of existing terrain. The map is flat, but the land is not. We're running out of time anyway, so why not spend it on this?

Coulda used good news. This ain't it.

From the National Weather Service today:

...WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH
THURSDAY EVENING...

* WHAT...Heavy snow possible. Travel will be very difficult to
  impossible, including during the morning commute on Thursday.
  Total snow accumulations of 6 to 12 inches are possible.

* WHERE...All of New Hampshire and western Maine.

* WHEN...From Wednesday afternoon through Thursday evening.

* ADDITIONAL DETAILS...Snow covered and slippery roads, and
  significant reductions in visibility are possible.

_____________________________________________________________________________

The daytime highs hop right back up to the forties immediately after this bounty of slop. And it falls in many cases on bare, thawed ground. Spring skiing is not done on spring snow.

Astronomical spring, marked by the equinox, is not meteorological spring, measured from the beginning of March. While by one measure we are still in winter's province, the sun grows stronger even before the day lengthens to 12 hours and beyond. Winter-type precipitation is likely from any storm, but it falls into a more hostile setting than it would find under the long nights and brief days of January and early February.

A quick inch last night was just a foretaste, and something to mess up the roads for anyone rashly contemplating a morning wobble on the fixed-gear. I should grab one now, though, as the sun has warmed the roadway sufficiently to clear it. Six to 12 inches will not go as quietly.

Winterwise, all bets are off

Apparently, the combination of La Nina, the volcano in Bali about which we hear nothing anymore, and climate change in general, has brought us wild fluctuations that defy routine.

Christmas brought snow, followed by subzero nights and days where the temperature stayed below 10F for the most part. I recorded nighttime lows of -14F, -15F, and -10F before leaving for Baltimore to copilot the cellist back to her school-year employment in the Baltimore area.

Baltimore was as cold as a slightly below normal New Hampshire January. Water mains were bursting all over the city. There were more than 50 of them while I was there. And, of course, the plight of Baltimore city schools has made national news.

I was snowbound in Baltimore when barely an inch of it fell during the "Bomb Cyclone." Helplessly I watched the storm swirl over my home, while was stuck 500 miles away. My train to Connecticut kept getting canceled. While my part of New Hampshire got less than 10 inches, It was followed by a frigid wave with lows down around -20F, and relentless winds.

After just enough time for me to clear the driveway, porches and decks, and rake the roof edges, the temperature mounted steadily above freezing before vaulting into the 50s, with heavy rain. Nearly all of the snow disappeared. The fog was like trying to see through a sheep.

After another little dip toward zero, the temperature settled at an unspectacular but still frozen level. The four or five inches of snow we got on Wednesday made the roads slippery, but did nearly nothing to reopen the cross-country ski trails.

My prediction, based on the pessimism born of 31 years living in New England, is that the next shot of bitterly cold air will arrive around the third week of March, followed by large storms of heavy, wet snow. Spring snow is horrible for spring skiing, because it is always clumpy, and never manages to firm up. You need a decaying snowpack that has consolidated over a couple of months to get the legendary best conditions. My forecast is based on the idea that I will be jonesing hard for the bike commute by then, so what can nature do to make that highly inadvisable. Last winter went a bit like that. I had started riding base miles in February and early March when winter came stumbling back with a series of storms that ended with a 10-inch snowfall on April 1. It was mid April before I started a somewhat regular schedule of riding.

Whatever happens, we'll creep in this petty pace from day to day. Time to creep off to work now.

Evolved from its environment

As winter comes closer, bicyclists are like birds: a few still flit around, but most have vanished until spring.

The shop where I have spent the last 28 years started out as a cross-country ski shop in 1972, as that sport began a phenomenal boom across the entire country. Throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s, skinny skis showed up anywhere a heavy frost might occur. People discovered as a result how short and warm the winters really were, in most places, so the sport receded again to what we believed were the more reliably snowy areas.

Many ski shops in snow country developed other business for the snowless seasons. Bikes were a common choice. In the 1970s, the "ten-speed boom" provided a summer counterpart to the cross-country ski boom. As the ten-speed boom mutated into the triathlon boom and the rising tide of mountain biking, some form of bicycle continued to bring in decent money in what ski shops had considered the off season.

Other economic forces in New Hampshire helped to create a year-round local economy for a while. People actually lived here and had disposable income. They raised families and bought equipment for them. It was never sustainable, based as it was on the illusion of prosperity created in the 1980s by ignoring the environmental and social consequences of overpopulation and predatory economic practices. But enough people had what appeared to be a good life that they spent freely on lighthearted recreation. On the fringes of that, a few cranks like me advocated for generally non-motorized lifestyles while deriving our sustenance from the more frivolous majority. We could keep harping on the more practical, larger applications and hope that the message got through. We were all lulled by the sense that things would somehow be okay. Improvement is only gradual at the best of times, because people have to figure things out for themselves. If our species collectively makes the worse choice, we're all goin' down, and there's really nothing you can do about it. It's exactly like being in an airliner that some crazy bastards have decided to fly into the World Trade Center. You may disagree, but the whack jobs at the controls have decided that we gonna die.

Cross-country skis have not been a gold mine for quite a while now. And fragmentation of bicycling into what are essentially warring religions has broken up that revenue stream. It has also made the service side harder. Not only are the machines more complex, the riders in their factions want to go where they hear the familiar liturgy of their respective faith. This is clearest in the road/mountain divide. Look at comment threads on the problems of road cycling and you will see mountain bikers asserting that no one should ride on the road anyway. The smart kids are all hurtling down the trail on hefty beasts, safely away from traffic. It's a strange combination of bravado and fear.

The rivalry between road and mountain bikes was largely made up during the early years of the mountain bike. But it became more real as the technology diverged more and more. Many factors can be manipulated to drive the rider groups further apart. Course design pre-selects for a riding style that will prevail. Cost of the machine makes people choose one or the other. Lack of vigorous industry support for better road conditions leaves road cyclists exposed to a hostile environment while the debate about infrastructure rages. Mountain biking, meanwhile, takes place in constructed environments rather than found environments. Off-road cyclists don't look for trails in their area that they think they can ride. They look for constructed facilities that favor the trick and gravity riding style that makes good videos.

Pure bike shops promote winter service as a way to bring in money and take the edge off of the spring avalanche of service demand. As a ski shop, we can't do that. As long as we cling to the remnants of cross-country skiing, we must convert to cold-weather activities in the hope that the weather and the economy bring us some income.

Even converting to a pure cycling focus would require a lot of advertising and promotion. In the 1990s, when cross-country skiing started to decline, mountain bikers were exploring winter trails. This happened mostly when we didn't have a lot of snow. It was the beginning of the studded tire movement, using existing trails, and frozen lakes. The return of deeper snow would shift the majority back to skiing. As shops dropped out of the cross-country ski business, our shop grew because we had established ourselves in the sport and were too dumb to quit. We drew from a wider and wider geographical area.

Now that winter is much less reliable, cross-country skiing is barely clinging to life, and shoppers can get what little gear they need from internet merchants, we can no longer afford to stock in depth and variety that serves the whole spectrum of the cross-country ski experience. As with bicycling, the different forms have diverged so widely that they are practically different sports entirely. Telemark is just another way to preen on the slopes. Touring can mean anything from a casual trudge around a local golf course to a multi-day trek across the tundra. Performance skiing requires excellent grooming on carefully constructed trails. And the whole thing depends on the arrival of natural snow. The cross-country areas that make snow can only do so on small, closed courses, so only the most dedicated addicts will accept its limitations for the sake of the workout. Racing gear may be expensive, but you don't make a lot of money off of racers.

My last experience in a year-round bike shop was my first experience working in a bike shop at all. Winters in Alexandria, Virginia, were short enough that we did not make a huge effort to solicit winter business. The gap between Christmas sales and the onset of spring was barely three months. That period was hardly dead. The DC area in 1980-'81 had a thriving commuter culture. This new thing called The Ironman brought in runners who suddenly wanted to learn about racing bikes. And new bike inventory had to be assembled well before the fair-weather riders came looking. When I left in May 1981, my job choices took me away from cycling until the spring of 1989, hundreds of miles to the north.

The idea of spending a winter with less direct customer contact and a steady flow of unhurried mechanical work sounds pretty pleasant. But maybe a steady, unhurried flow is not enough to pay the bills. When I left the first bike shop in 1981, I went to a sail loft that made most of its money on winter service. I started in May of '81. Summer business seemed pretty steady to me. But right after the beginning of January the floodgates opened. We were on overtime, 50-60 hours a week with only one day off, until some time in March. If it hadn't been that intense, we would not have had the money to get through the rest of the year. I hadn't thought about the fact that people don't want to give up their sails until the boat's laid up. On top of that we would get orders for racing yachts going south. The first winter was insane. The second winter was not so bad...and half the production staff got laid off by July.

It all depends on your overhead. The owner of the loft had a lifestyle to maintain. It's a luxury business. There's not a lot of transportational sailing in this country. And we did not do small boat sails. The whole production line was geared to large pieces of fabric. Once in a while, as a favor, the owner would take an order for dinghy sails and they would jam things up unbelievably. Dinky sails is more like it. But then a big genoa for a 58-footer would totally blanket a loft built around dinghy sails.

As weird as bikes get, they have not approached the size range of boats and the things that you attach to boats. About the most awkward thing we get in the bike shop is the occasional tandem. Even e-bikes, despite their incredible mass, are not much larger in volume than the biggest upright cruiser.

For this winter, we are working our usual routine. That's the plan, anyway. Because prosperity has been based on flawed concepts for hundreds -- if not thousands -- of years, the cracks run deep. At some point we may have to face the truth, that a civilization in which you need to make a special effort to get healthful exercise in your leisure time is itself so unnatural that it must be dismantled before it destroys everything else. At that point, efficient human-powered transportation will be an asset, combined with public transit and vehicles that derive motive power from external renewable energy sources. But I don't think that will happen in the next few months. We'll spend the winter pretending that weekend recreation and vacation travel are still viable with a shriveling middle class stretching static incomes across widening gaps in their budget.

Worthless weather went on

The weather's April Fool's Day joke for my area was 10 inches of wet, heavy snow on top of the remnants of the existing snowpack and the exposed mud of dirt roads and driveways. The snow thrower would barely launch it five feet, let alone the 10 to 15 feet that I count on to clear my parking area. Fortunately, the sanity of spring sunshine sizzled the 10 inches down to five or six by the end of the next day, and cooked off even more yesterday.

We were threatened with another three to six inches of glop today, but we've gotten rain, instead. I rejoice. Snow that falls at this point in the season isn't good for anything. It's basically just white mud. It impedes all forms of mobility. Trust me, I've tried a number of them. The only conveyance that could move unhindered would be a hovercraft. While pedal-powered versions have been made, I would not want to take one very far.

With warmth and rain dominating the forecast all week, maybe things will clear out enough to get around.

And then it snowed

After dwindling away to nearly nothing, winter jumped back into the game with 15-20 inches of snow. Depth varied with your location. I measured about 16 at home. The ski center claimed 18.

Before the snow, I could have launched the commuting season as soon as Daylight Relocating Time moved light to the evening. Yes, I have lights, but I've said numerous times that you could set yourself on fire and some drivers still would not notice you.

In the shop, we had to drag out rental equipment we had started to put into storage. This isn't a real money maker, this late in a mediocre season, but it's our core winter business, so we have to meet whatever demand presents itself. I hate when bike and ski stuff jam together in the workshop, because the substances they use are so incompatible. In that equation, bike lubes are worse for ski bases than ski waxes might be for most surfaces of a bike, but we're still trying to fit awkwardly shaped objects into a shared space without damaging any of them.

Timing of the snow and other items on the schedule meant that I did not shift seamlessly back to an athletic routine of workouts on the snow. Back to? I never established one at all, this winter. Muscling the snow thrower around provided a couple of days of exercise. Later there was some shoveling.

The strengthening sun hasn't made the snow miraculously disappear, but it does modify it much more quickly than the weaker rays of deep winter would. The surface becomes slow and sticky, while the full depth remains fine-grained. Skis pick up moisture on the way through the top layer before dropping down into the powder to clump up and slow down. Or you could go to the groomed trails, if you have time.

If we move relatively steadily into spring conditions, the roads will melt clear, the snowbanks shrivel again, and I'll be able to get out of the car. No doubt there will be a few bad jokes from the weather during the next month and a half. But the darkness and its attendant cold have to follow their fixed schedule. What we get may not be balmy and inviting, but it will probably be doable.

In memory of Sachs Sedis

Ordering chains the other day, I sifted through the offerings from SRAM, KMC, Shimano, and others. Our default chain has been SRAM, because their chains are descended from the legendary Sedisport, the sleeper deal chain of the 1980s.

Very little can be seen of the original Sedisport in the SRAM chains of today.  The formerly flared inner plates are now straight.

The outer plates are shaped very similarly to Shimano's Hyperglide and Uniglide chains, which the Sedisport once outperformed. The change was gradual, and the chains are still functional and durable. But the reflex to choose them is probably more emotional than anything else.

Vintage Sedisport. Burly side plates, cleverly flared inner plates to facilitate shifting. Born when drive trains were moving to six speeds. My, my. What will be next? Gears that click into place?

Look at the opportunities for advertising, recklessly squandered. The side plates of the chain are completely blank. It's as if they expect their distinctive design to speak for them.

The 1990s saw the introduction of the Sedisport ATB. The links shown here date from after the merger with Sachs, as the stamping on the side plates shows.

The outer plates were straight, with beveled edges. The pins were starting to be riveted in ways that led to the development of closure links. Shimano, of course, had their persnickety special pins. Sachs developed a closure link shortly before they were bought by SRAM.

Ten- and eleven-speed drive trains need straight-sided chains because the spacing of the gears is so tight. Differences, if any, are subtle. Because I don't indulge, I depend on the feedback of those who do to decide what to supply them with. I know what I favor, but that can change every year as the industry removes options.

Chain shopping was tangential to larger games of componentry chess I started last fall, when a couple brought in their Seven touring bikes to be reconfigured with more practical drive trains, and another customer wanted to dress a new frame with an 11-speed racing group. His Specialized Roubaix had cracked, and Specialized had sent a warranty replacement. Same brand, same model name, but of course it had some different specs. That game was more a matter of cost-benefit analysis, working within his budget and a couple of specific requests.

Interesting indoor activities help pass the time as winter reclaims March. This happens every year. We complain that the mild weather won't stick around, but 20 years ago these conditions would have looked like the beginning of April, not the beginning of March.

The hard freezes after springlike warmth have pretty well wrecked the cross-country skiing, even in the nearby woods. This limits alternative training activities to things that are more boring, and therefore less likely. Despite the fact that I can literally feel that sitting on the couch is killing me, I still slouch in front of the computer, teasing my mind with little jabs of electronic stimulation. Old friends, new friends, hopeful signs, terrifying trends, ads for diseases you, yes you, probably have...

Back to the hunt for bike parts. Look at that: Specialized has multiple road models that list for $10,000. Way to grow the sport! When civilization collapses, where will we charge our electronic shifters? I know, I know: personal solar systems will continue to work, as long as you can find a place to soak up some sun in between attacks by various desperadoes unleashed by the apocalypse. And you'll be able to scrounge hydraulic fluid for the brakes for quite a few years before things have reverted to more medieval conditions. Brake pads, on the other hand...

I've gotten out for a few fixed gear rides. The return to cold weather puts me back to scrounging kindling and pine cones to start the evening fires in the wood stoves. Scavenging wood is best done on skis, as long as there is any snow cover. It's not a high-intensity workout, but it combines some basic exercise with a practical need. That's been my guiding principle for my entire adult life.

Bike commuting is to train for

Whenever someone tells me that something basically trivial is "to die for," I am briefly tempted to make them do it. But the vapid assertion provides a take-off point for more substantive ones.

Here it is, the end of February in northern New England. Around my house and in the woods, the snow is anywhere from six to 24 inches deep, except in places where it is deeper because of windblown drifts or created piles. But these are the remains of the much deeper snow we received in two storms very close together just before the middle of the month. That was before the temperature went above 60 degrees for a couple of days, in the middle of a longer period when the nighttime lows hardly got below freezing. The jet stream giveth and the jet stream taketh away. That's not to mention the other factors making New England's typical gyrations even more bizarre.

The thaw has shriveled the snow away from the road edges, clearing the bikeable area. At the same time, it destroyed the groomed trails on which one might have laid down a winter rhythm of alternative training.

While I have not seen riders, some of them have reported to me that they have been out and have seen others out. Calls to the shop for bike tuneups began while the snowbanks still slumped into the lanes. Road salt made those puddles as briny as the ocean. But people fixate on the temperature alone. Warmth is the deciding factor, even when they'd be better served by cold.

We did need the thaw to shrink the snowbanks back. But once the whole travel surface is clear, a freeze keeps things dry. I know a couple of things from years of experience: first, someone who gets their annual tuneup now will need more work by May or June to deal with the effects of salt and wet grit; second, when the weather turns cold again -- and it will -- bikes brought in for early service will be forgotten until June. Most of them will be forgotten in our shop, where we will have to work around them until their owners feel the urge for them again.

Riding in the grit and brine is probably only a little more abusive than pounding on a trainer, with a rain of sweat flowing down over the machinery.

I surveyed the route on my way home from work yesterday. If the roads stay this clear, I have no excuse not to launch the commute as soon as Daylight Relocating Time kicks in. With that in mind, I headed out for some base miles on the fixed-gear today.

The first hundred yards reminded me what a crappy winter this has been for exercise. But then I also did several sets of squats yesterday, in anticipation of the anticipation of the beginning of riding season. So the fried quads owed a little to that, as well as the time spent on the couch in a pile of cats.

I used to dream of glorious endeavors when I trained, especially during the first heroic rides coming out of the winter. Now I dream of surviving and thriving in my commute. The commute was always there, but I took it for granted. It's not good to take anything for granted.

The weather may change again. March can be snowy. Once we pass the equinox, however, the sun really gains the advantage. Even now, it is much stronger than it was a month ago. It quickly attacks late-season snows. And if the pattern remains dry, or the wetness comes on warm air, the road will remain clear.

Freedom isn't free. To be free from the car, I have to be strong enough to claim it. It's to train for.

Sometimes the old days really were good

A couple of bike tourists have left me their Sevens to reconfigure with 9-speed cassettes, triple cranks and barcon shifters. This is after a few years riding with the carbon compact cranks, 10-speed cassettes, and SRAM Double Tap shifters originally installed.

They came in originally because one of the shifter paddles had snapped off on one of those SRAM Double Tap shifters, they way they are prone to do. SRAM offers the shifter paddle as a replacement part, but only below the point at which they always snap off.

Any of my regular readers will know how I scoff at the brifter concept for anyone but a dedicated racer. The fact that spell check produces the word "grifter" when it flags brifter as a misspelling seems highly appropriate. Oh boy! More expensive crap to break! And don't even think about fixing it yourself.

Accustomed to vehicles that can't be repaired and that use mysterious assemblies that function perfectly until they suddenly don't function at all, modern riders have been well trained to avoid doing much of their own maintenance and repair. You can still change a tire, dial in your index shifting, and lube a chain, but don't mess with anything else.

As part of the design process, I pored over gear charts to come up with cassettes that would offer helpful gear intervals int he ranges these riders will actually use. I came up with a good range on a 9-speed 13-36, with 26-36-48 chainrings, that had no duplicates (one, actually, but not in a combination one should use) and gave closer spacing in the low range than the high range. Unfortunately, we would have to buy at least four cassettes, plus eight or ten Miche cogs, to get two cassettes with the desired cog sizes.

Here's where the olden days were better than nowadays: When cassettes were introduced by Shimano around 1980, they offered a rider complete flexibility to spec and assemble gear ranges suited to individual need or desire. This could still be true, but some bean counter figured out that it was cheaper for the company to offer specific cassettes with unchangeable ranges. The free-range cog has nearly vanished.

Miche offers complete custom capability, but only from 11 to 29 teeth.

My customers could use some sort of dinky crank with a tiny BCD, but 64-104 or 110-74 are widely available in case of a breakdown in the boonier parts of the world. So topping out at 29 is not the best option.

Having discovered that the cogs for my ideal cassettes will be expensive to collect, I'll dig back into the gear charts and figure out how to make the best of what the industry forces on us. With the War on Front Derailleurs, some crazy wide-range cassettes are showing up. I sketched out a few ideas for an 18-speed cassette, just to try to get ahead of the trend by a year or two. Maybe out of all the horseshit and chaos I'll find something off the shelf that does most of what I had put together in my original design.

Crankwise, the workhorse Deore triple seems like the best choice. I like the old reliable Sugino XD 600, but I wonder when the square tapered bottom bracket axle will finally disappear. I should start stockpiling.

It's the time of year when the weather can change radically from one day to the next. It snowed all day today, only netting a couple of inches. The National Weather Service outlook for December sets up parameters that could bring snow, but their three-month outlook inclines toward more drought or possibly rain. Attempts to park and ride or park and ski fail because no one plows out places to park. The trip to work becomes all or nothing.

For the past several years I have put studded tires on my path commuter, and then either had bare ground or deep snow to deal with. Installing them is still the signal that winter is really here.

Spring Snow

"Spring snow is poor man's fertilizer" is an indirect way of saying "This is bullshit!" After a day in the 70s last week, it's about 12 degrees here this morning, after a day of steady snow and temperatures in the 20s.

It is beautiful, sparkly fluff. It will be washed away by Thursday's torrential rains. The rest of the forecast shows temperatures appropriate to early March, with a threat of hypothermic moisture on every day.

Litter in the age of heroin

I spotted a syringe on the side of Route 28 this morning -- probably not tossed there by a sloppy diabetic. I stopped to look for something I could use to mark the spot so an officer could find it when I phoned it in to the sheriff's department.

Conveniently, a state trooper happened to drive by. I flagged him down and pointed out the syringe. Then I resumed the trudge to town. It's a chilly, windy day, before a downright cold day. Then we get a snowstorm for the first day of spring. It could be our biggest snowstorm of the winter. Or it could bring only an inch.

By Thursday we're looking at 50 degrees again. Interesting.

Base miles or anomaly

Other riders have been out religiously in this weak winter. For various reasons, one or two of them possibly valid, I only shook off the deep embrace of the couch today, to begin rebuilding some semblance of fitness for the commuting season.

The illusion of April is eerie. This is heightened by the fact that upper management decided to lop off the last half hour of the business day, releasing us at 5 p.m. The day feels about as long as it always did, but we get out with that half-hour of extra daylight to throw off years of conditioning. It's like an early shot of Daylight Saving Time to make spring seem much closer than it really is.

The National Weather Service says,

A POTENT STORM SYSTEM MAY BRING SNOW...RAIN AND MIXED
PRECIPITATION TUESDAY NIGHT AND WEDNESDAY. CONFIDENCE IN EXACT
PRECIPITATION TYPE AT ANY GIVEN LOCATION IS LOW AT THIS TIME.

Thus beginneth March. The next couple of days look like good enough riding weather, but a big load of frozen items would interrupt the steady accumulation of bike rides. We serve at the pleasure of that whacky jet stream. A series of frozen storms would disrupt outdoor riding even if it did not provide conditions for wintry alternatives. So I can't get all jacked up about the season being truly underway. It goes one ride at a time.

Into the great unknown

With several days left in February, the shop has started making the transition to bike season. It will never be an immediate, drastic shift, because the weather and people's schedules don't work that way. It's always a series of steps. But this is probably the earliest we have ever started them.

For a couple of winters in the 1990s we had a combination of low snow and a surging mountain bike culture. We did a lot of winter repairs for the die-hards who were experimenting with studded tires for the frozen lakes and hard-packed snowmobile trails. That subsided on its own, as we got into a pattern of snowier winters and mountain biking continued to evolve away from the masses.

While the bike component never goes away completely, there is enough of a heritage of real winter sports around here to pull most of our customers into those traditional seasonal pastimes.

This year, the ski trails have not survived the series of rain storms that has pummeled us. So here we are, in the "dead of winter," dead in the water. And then we're slithering on ice when the water we're dead in freezes with the next cold snap.

We have no choice but to ring the dinner bell for the restless cyclists who have been asking when we're going to get busy on the greasy side of things. There must be three or four of them altogether.

I hate trying to work on stuff in the "wrong" season, because the shop is not set up for the slick routines of efficient work flow. Handlebars snag on rental skis. Grease and oil can pollute ski wax. Bikey bench grime is no place to lay a new ski for bindings to be mounted.

Based on the forecast a week ahead, we can look forward to more cycles of dry cold and warm wet. March could continue the trend, or flip it and bury us, initiating a return to ski business. This late in the season, that doesn't mean much in the way of income, but if you're trying to play the touring center game you can't ignore snow before the beginning of April.

For now, I'm preparing rental skis for storage, and rental bikes for the summer ahead. Instead of telling callers they'd be better off waiting for April to bring in their repairs, we're telling them to come on down. February looks like April. That does not guarantee that March won't try to pretend it's January. We're seeing the legendary New England fickle weather elevated to psychopathology.

Things appropriate to winter

While we haven't had as much snow as our compatriots 500 miles to the south, one can't be bitter and boycott the little rind we have.

Finally got out to patrol the woods out back yesterday and today.

http://explorexc.blogspot.com/2016/01/shwackin-out-back.html

http://explorexc.blogspot.com/2016/01/ski-new-england-back-country.html

Now, back to the work week and whatever follows.

In a vacuum

I suspended the park 'n' ride commute when the cellist came home for her winter break. She only had ten days, and lots to do, so I was not going to take time getting home from work.

The day after she arrived she went right into a midnight mass gig at a Catholic church about an hour away. And they do mean midnight. We ended up getting to sleep around 3 a.m. But the gig was a hoot. She was working with a skillful keyboardist/choir director/vocalist. Watching them crunch arrangements together during a rehearsal right before the show -- I mean the service -- was the best part of the trip.

The cellist and I rode on Christmas Day. It was 60 degrees.

On December 29th it snowed. That ends my park and ride because I have no place to park. And if the path gets rutted up and refrozen it's slow going for anyone, even on 4-inch tires (which I don't have).

The new month in the new year brought the usual town government meetings, too. So, a day at a time, I waddle into the winter, one day after another with no exercise except a little splitting and carrying of firewood.

The lack of skiing turns my job more janitorial. The edict came from on high: vacuum the entire shop. The bag was already pretty hefty. After I finished, it weighed 8 1/2 pounds. That's at least 3 1/2 off the record of 12-plus, set a couple of years ago, but still a respectable effort. Above 7 pounds, the vacuum barely picks up anything anymore. And it's hard to maneuver at that weight.

One interesting customer ordered a Surly Cross Check with some custom modifications. Additional accessories and tweaks will go on for months.

Two inches of rain forecast for tomorrow will bomb the ski trails back to November. Then no one knows...

I decided years ago that the legendary New England winter was not the average. Climate change has increased the number of wimpy ones, but the real epics, with snow drifts to the second floor, were probably always anomalies. Legends are made of extremes. The winter may not always deserve fame, but New England will always find a way to be annoying.