Fun with bicycles and snow
Skinny tires are good for cutting through the snow down to the road hidden underneath, but they aren’t good enough for 10+ inches of snow.
I tried to take the bicycle down to the big big store this afternoon, but had to abandon the idea when I discovered that, even in 42:32, all the rear wheel would do is sit there and spin cheerfully in the not-quite-deep-enough slot it cut in the layers of packed snow on 17th Ave (and if I gave the bicycle a running start by starting on my shovelled front sidewalk, it would cheerfully charge ahead until I ran into unshovelled snow, at which point the wheels would lift off the pavement and hang, spinning frictionlessly, in the newfallen snow.
I’ve got rim brakes, so the zip-tie trick would only work if I wanted to completely abandon the idea of stopping, so the trekracycle ended up being returned to the living room while I walked down to 13th and Tacoma for the groceries de jour.
(I wonder if I could find one of those trainer frames and rework it so that the bicycle wheel drove a set of caterpillar treads and I could pretend I’m driving a Lombard log hauler in the deep woods of SE Portland. It would certainly be more amusing than mail-ordering a set of Nokian A10s, and would be (assuming that Portland winters have not suddenly become real winters) every bit as useful as studded tires are.)
(UPDATE: Looky here, someone else has Lombard-lust for their bicycle. I wonder how it would work on an Xtracycle?)