Snow Bike Sunbreak

Snow Biking Park City

A pause before the decent off Lost Prospector Trail

A New Year’s Resolution is spring cleaning for the mind, and if you do it right, for the body. It’s a chance to take stock and issue an epic course correction. Too much fast food? New diet. Too much cheap beer? Microbrew. Too many short rides in the same old places? New bike, new places, new experiences. Those are the bullet points, but the reality, the stuff that gives us the stories we tell, is always much richer. The world goes ever more Technicolor, burns noticeably brighter when body clapping ground seems imminent. There’s a reason the bike industry is in love with fat bikes. They make cycling six-year-old fresh. On snow, everything you know about bike handling becomes a kind of negotiation, like trying to reason with an avalanche. In that, there’s a rush.

At heart, we’re all still kids; that’s when the world was new as a hot meal, as limitless as space, as fun as Disneyland and as possible as a key in a tumbler. While most of the world has grown up—or old, depending on your view—if you’re reading this, there’s a fair chance you ride bikes because it’s a chance to cling to the one thing in your life that has always made sense. And if bikes were ever fun, then bikes on snow are bound to be fun because if a bike is fun and snow is fun then bike times snow equals … well they don’t have words for that. You just gotta try it. Which is how most great things in the world work. Coca-Cola, Led Zeppelin, sex—you couldn’t appreciate how great any of those things were until you tried them. And why would you go back to a life without them?

Even if you don’t have snow, or a budget for a new bike, now is the time to consider new rides, and new reads, such as this one.

Descending that flow trail, was like sledding on a bike: lock up the tires, unweight the front, and steer with body english until the ground levels off and you start pedaling again. On the other side of the ridge, Sundance was happening, and my guide with the Hollywood-like name, Weston Deutschlander said,

The #fatbike was serious #funhogging with @bikehugger and I tested the #downhill capabilities and we found their limit.

Funhogging for sure, at the limits of traction.

New Year New Rides

Descending like a sled on a snow bike was my new year new ride and that’s the theme of Issue 08 of our magazine that drops this week. Subscribe now on iTunes and read more about our biking adventures in 2014, including short stories from Patrick Brady.

Lost Prospector Trail

Lost Prospector Trail

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