SNOW.

Last winter was disappointing in respect to snowfall.  Nobody minds if we miss out on the -20 temps, but we like to have some snow if it's going to be cold at all.  Especially since fatbikes are so on the rise here.  I bought my Mukluk 2 last year, and didn't get to ride much on snow.  I still had a great time however, and I've been looking forward to this winter ever since.  

Last Sunday brought us our first big snowfall in the Twin Cities.  Some surrounding areas apparently got a foot and a half.  We didn't see that much, but got our fair share.  We went from brown to thoroughly white and fluffy.  I was finishing a trip for work in the morning, and thankfully we were able to land in the heavy snow and low visibility, since I wanted to be done with work and ride my Mukluk!  :)  Jonathan was up for it too, so we met at the MN river bottoms like usual and took off.  

In many places it was quite ridable with a little grunt work, and in some places it was as much fresh powder as even a fatbike will plow through.  (I've heard that with higher temps and many people out riding/snowshoeing the bottoms have become pretty nice to ride since, but haven't been back down yet.)   Packed snow and fresh powder are two different animals.  

We had a great time seeing what the Mukluks/ourselves could take, and simply being out in nature when it's dumping snow.  We like our four different seasons.  Hopefully this winter will bring lots of snow like Sunday did.  Have fun out there!

Mukluk'n Duluth's Beaches...

The day before Halloween I took the Mukluk up to Duluth to get a change of scenery.  I had been in ground school most of the month, and was about to live in a Memphis hotel room for too much of November for work, and I wanted to get some air.  Northern lake air.  

Duluth has a beach front extending from Canal Park that goes on for 6 miles, so it makes for a very nice fat bike out and back.  I've been told it's better to ride when things freeze over, but I enjoyed this day as well despite the sand being in it's loose non-winter state.  

The wind was up pretty big, as you'll see from the waves in the following pictures.  Made things a bit chilly, but that's Duluth and I don't mind a bit.  Fat biking the beach was the warm outdoor option apparently, as people were surfing in dry suits.  Duluth matches the tenacity of other outdoor minded towns in that people don't stay inside for a silly thing like cold.  They ask what fun they can have in it.  Yup.  

I was also trying out a new piece of gear, imagine that.  I love my Revelate Designs frame bag on my Mukluk, and I've recently added a handlebar sling (which I didn't use for this ride), and a Viscacha expandable seat pack (that's the new piece).  I had way more than enough storage for my little day tour, but wanted to try out the gear.  I had with me lots of water, lunch, a stove, coffee press and cup, lights in case I stayed out late, a wind fleece jacket for stationary times, and the normal cycling tools and spare fat tube.  Probably some other bits in there too but I forget.  

The sand went from hard pack to super loose, and the Mukluk floated most of it with ease.  There were a couple sections that no bike would stay up in, but that's what feet are for.  I played more with tire pressure on this ride than I have in most of the first year of owning a fat bike, and found that in the loosest stuff I could ride, 7psi is my winning pressure, or right around where my sidewalls start to lose form with my rider and gear weight.  

I rode the whole beach out and back, with a bit of exploration of some woods near the end.  

I'll be returning in different seasons, particularly winter to ride the dunes in frozen form.   

Mukluk with waves and cold weather surfer in the background (look close)...

Miles and miles of great sand and debris for rolling big tires over...

Winning pressure of the day...

Out near Sky Harbor airport...

If you know Sky Harbor at all, you can barely make out runway 32's approach end...

Duluth is for fat bikers...

The Headless Fat Biker of Lake Superior...Happy Halloween!

I'll be back in the cold...

Antlers and Fat bike car rack adaptors...

Alright, two random things to post.  First- anyone who's done any amount of cycling has picked something up in their tire that delays their ride a bit.  Could be a nail, glass, tacks thrown on to your Tour de France stage, or in the case of a MN fat bike ride- an entire deer antler!  No joke, a friend of mine was taking a test ride on my Mukluk, and while rolling through the MN River Bottoms flood plain area, came to a very quick stop after having an antler wrap itself around my Larry 3.8, and jamming in the Enabler fork.  It's got clearance for most things, but apparently not animal parts.  

Caused some abrupt decelerating...:)

Second- I'm sure most of you fat-bikers out there have come up with solutions as to how to transport your bike, but I'm gonna add my method to the lists in case you're still searching.  I've subscribed to the "build your own spacer kit" plan that is found on many forum threads and other's blogs.  The general problem (simplified) is that a fat bike fork is 135mm wide, and a standard fork mount on everybody's car racks is 100mm wide.  You can make a "spacer plug" for each side of your fork mount that will extend it's total width to accommodate a fat bike fork.  It's quite simple.  Just find an old front quick release axle that you can cut in half (I went to a used bike parts store in Uptown MPLS).  It needs to be a front axle, because otherwise it won't slide into your rack's quick release core.  (Some say this can create a problem with the finished product, as your fork will be mounting to a 9mm "front" axle rather than a 10mm "rear" axle.  I would say this depends on the dropouts on your fork.  I didn't have any negative effects from this, my Enabler has plenty of room in the dropout area, and if you're worried, I suppose you could wrap 1mm worth of tape around the axle where your fork will contact it.  But anyway, back to basic instructions.   Collect 17.5mm worth of nuts you can put on each half.  This is the difference of 35mm between a regular and fat fork, remember.  Make sure the outer plug adaptor nut is grooved just like the one on your bike's hub that is in connection with your fork while mounted.   Tighten them all together with either cone or c wrenches, as appropriate to the size of the nut used, so that they leave the same clearance at the end for you fork as the hub on your bike (I think it's about 3.5-4mm from memory, but I'd measure first).  There you have it- just remove your rack's fork mount quick release, slide your homemade plug adaptors in each side, and simply use the quick release from your bike's front hub to attach your fork to your rack.  I think I paid $6 for the whole mess, and that's only because I had to buy an entire used front hub to get the axle.  If you found just the axle at a used parts place, I bet you could do this for around a buck.  That's considerable cheaper than the industry's commercial adaptors that go for $60-90.  Oh, and for the rear wheel, I just use a basic nylon strap.  It fits well on my Yakima Sprocket Rocket, which is pretty wide as it is.  If you have a narrower rack tray you may need to continue with your creativity in making something that fits into the tray and will accommodate your big honking tire.  I believe in you.  

Your new "plug spacer adaptor things"...

Grooved outer nut that will contact fork (just like your hub)...

Shown with the Yakima Sprocket Rocket...

Simple strap for the rear wheel...

Shown with a generic fork mount on my home welded truck bed rack...

Mini-rok...

I've been eyeing the many gravel grinders that my area of the country puts on for a while now, but I usually don't get the chance to participate due to working weekends.  However, many of these events post GPS data covering the routes they follow, sharing some of the best gravel in the state (that riders have discovered and shared so far).  Southeast MN's bluff country, and the Arrowhead region are the areas I get the most excited to ride/explore.  The southeast is full of a mixture of lazy rivers flowing between bluffs, and country farm scenes, and the Arrowhead is just plain North-woods goodness, and gets you decidedly out of town.   

In the beginning of October, my friend Jonathan and I took an afternoon to ride a section of the Ragnarok 105.  We picked the southern section that followed along the Zumbro River.  It was a pretty drab, blustery day, but we had a good time.  

The event rides themselves usually see a mixture of bikes, from carbon cross racers, to Fargo/Karate Monkey types, to an occasional rider punishing themselves rolling a fat bike.  I'd sure like to try the light and fast cross version if I get the chance, but for now I roll on my heavy-ish Surly KM.  Jonathan was kind enough to leave his Kona Jake at home and ride his mountain bike to even the field.  

Through the day we rolled through riverside bluffs, open rolling farmland, and small country towns, all the while on gravel "highways", byways, and the best- the occasional minimum maintenance road.  

I can't even remember how many miles we got in, but that's often a sign you're paying more attention to having fun, so that's fine.  I would like to complete a full "dirty" (off pavement) century via one of these routes sometime.  Just need to put in on the calendar I suppose.  They would make a great overnight tour as well.   

Looking back on fall...

I don't usually post pictures involving my career of flying (too many of my coworkers are already geeking out in that arena :)  ), but I do have to post a few shots of a private flight I was able to take with my wife and her parents this past fall.  We flew a fall colors tour up the North Shore of Lake Superior here in MN in one of the aircraft from my father in law's flying club, Flywell.  

It was an opportunity to see most of our favorite North Shore sites from a different perspective, and at what I thought to be as maybe a few short days past peak colors (the next day heavy winds would come up and take down most leaves).  Unfortunately, some sites where covered in lake effect fog, so we missed a couple places such as the Split Rock area, and Palisade Head/Tettegouche, but the sites further up the shore opened up.  Things are a bit flatter looking from altitude, but still pretty.  Below are a few shots of some of the areas we spend time in while playing on the ground...

Temperance River/Carleton Peak Area...

Moose Mountain/Lutsen Area...

Grand Marais...

Devils Track River Gorge...

Bean and Bear Lake...

Flywell's Archer, taken at Sky Harbor Airport, Duluth...

Not seeing the SW sites just made us decide that we're going to do the trip again next year!  

Headwaters Recap...

Well, so, I boogered up the live tracking attempt if you were watching this year.  I figured out what the problem was, and it turns out I was just using the wrong resource from SPOT.  SPOT Adventures is a place to archive and display previously recorded tracks/messages/etc. from a SPOT.  What I should have done is make a live page from a different portion of my account website and then I could have shared live tracking with everyone via Googlemaps.  Next time I'll get it right and you can follow the ride.  But hopefully you weren't inside trying to watch a little icon of me riding and were instead out living it up in the outdoors anyhow.  It's fall, which of course is my favorite season in the North.
The Headwaters started like it usually does- sleep deprived and cold.  I don't mind the cold, but as I get older the sleep deprivation seems to get more difficult.  It started this time with a minimum rest international overnight at my job, followed by a full day of flying, then we left St Paul for Park Rapids at about 9pm, arriving at 1am.  We got to bed just before 2, and were up at 6 to head to the ride.  Rolling by 7:30am, it was a good early start for a century, as opposed to my normal lazy 8-9am shows which always cause me to linger at the back of the pack and finish late.  But it was a tiring way to begin.
Things went surprisingly well, however.  We actually got into a tempo group that fit our fitness pretty well, and enjoyed paceline efficiency for the first 33 miles.  And it wasn't the standard scarey century ride paceline where you find guys that think they know how to ride close and coordinated but then hit their brakes randomly and all crash wondering what happened, it was a pretty smooth group for the most part.  Never felt overly nervous with these guys.  We actually dropped a couple of them twice before regrouping, which I'm not used to.   But my ego didn't enjoy getting inflated- by the end of the ride I was getting smoked by the usual century going retired guys on feather weight carbon who don't do anything but ride all the time.  :)  Guess I'm the working schlub now who should be raising kids.
The weather overall wasn't that terrible for the North- it started overcast and in the upper 30's/low 40's, and brightened up as the day went on, with winds NNW gusting to the mid twenties.  Pretty regular fall stuff.  The cold headwinds slowed us a bit in some sections, but we hammered out the worst of it during the paceline cooperation.
I was very very pleased with one thing in particular with this edition of the Headwaters (I've ridden it 6 or 7 times now, I'm loosing track.)  All the centuries I've ever done in the past have had the standard high and low moments.  Times when you feel strong, and times you just grit through cause you know it'll turn around soon.  Times you'd define as "bonking".  I never felt close to bonking on this one.  I had a couple times where my energy level felt a bit low, but I never felt truly out of gas, and didn't have to push through anything uncomfortable.  And I'm pretty sure I know why.  Centuries are notorious for pretty low quality rest stop foods.  Cookies, corn-syrupy artificial drinks, candy, chips, hydrogenated peanut butter and so on.  Uh oh, I'm winding up for a food talk.  :)  I tried different food tactics this year.  I tried to get more green plant nourishment in me, and more fiber along with the sugars I was taking in to stretch out the time the sugar was absorbed/used.  The food stops usually have some fruit, so I ate as much of that as I felt, and I brought with some green plant supplements (called Amazing Meal if you care) to mix in with my drinks.  Now this drink stuff isn't whole foods, but it did a much nicer job of stabilizing my energy levels than Gatorade has ever done.  The energy bars I brought with were made of all plant foods, as whole as possible for this type of serving style save for a couple, concentrating on figs or dates, nuts, and other dried fruits.  I also had a couple saltier bars with lots of nuts to eat with the rest stop bananas for electrolytes.  So while it's pretty hard to bring the produce aisle with you on a century, I think I made a much better fueling routine on this ride than others in the past.  I felt much better despite being what I still consider to be less in shape than pre-surguries.  And it's not to say I didn't eat any of the rest stop cookies, there were a couple slipped in there, but I think focusing more on the better foods helped a lot.  I recently read Scott Jurek's book, Eat and Run, and it has strengthened my goals of eating smart (and plant based) in distance events. 
On to pictures- I wasn't taking many as we were enjoying the ride too much and wanting to keep our forward movement, but between my friend Jonathan and myself we manged to get a couple shots worth posting.  The fall colors are looking great up there right now- I suggest you all get out and enjoy them before they pass.  My schedule at work is getting obnoxious so I hope I can get out for some more, but if not I'm thankful for getting this years Headwaters ridden, and I'm stoked I finally rode a full 100 after all my surgery nonsense.   Should've happened earlier.  Enjoy the fall!

Headwaters 100 Live Tracking...

Well, I finally broke down and bought a SPOT tracker.  I've been meaning to pick one up for quite some time, seeing as I'm always dragging my poor wife out into the woods where are phones are useless, and if we ever needed to call for help we'd be stuck.  So I bought one.  And it's not just for emergencies, it can be used for regular check in messages, and live tracking.  I'm going to give it a test run day by using the live tracking feature during this saturdays Headwaters 100 up in Park Rapids, MN.  I set up a SPOT Adventures page here for anyone who cares to watch my progress.  It'll be my first full century since my chest surgeries assuming I finish.  I've had to scratch at the past couple distance events I've tried during my long healing process.  I think this one should go well though.  Follow along if you feel like it, and better yet- come ride!

Rainy fatbike afternoon..

The weather in STP has been a roller-coaster this week.  September usually brings fall and an end to the summer heat, which I look forward to being a Northerner.  Well, last year's hot winter lead to this year's  hot summer, and tuesday was in the 90's with 40mph wind gusts.  Gross.  I did get out anyway that day on my Long Haul Trucker for a jaunt around town, and it was simply biking for the sake of biking- not particularly enjoyable however.  So when it finally cooled of yesterday and started raining, I at last felt some fall in the air and brought the fatbike down off it's garage hangers to get out into the Minnesota River Bottoms.  I had no real plans for mileage or goals of any kind other than enjoying the kind of riding the big tires bring.  Floating over miles of sandy trail, beach, flood plain, and muck is a good time if you ask me (and an ever growing number of cyclists in MN).  

I started out at the Sibley House historical site in Mendota Heights, which is a popular meeting place for river rambles.  The trail started out downright clean for rainy fall weather, and as the day went on and the sections of trail thinned, I got the broad range of conditions the area can throw at you.  Anywhere from stuff that could be handled on a cyclocross bike, to muck and sand that only the fat machine likes.  

Large bird that stayed put just until I took this picture- so it's the white blur taking off.  :)

Getting thinner and weedier...

OK, getting sticky and heavy...(still fine with a fatbike however)

Where is the trail?  Wait, who cares.  

I'm pretty excited for the upcoming fall and winter seasons, as I think the fatbiking scene is pretty stacked this year.  More and more people are starting to ride big tires, and more events are showing up all the time.  Plus, maybe it will actually snow and get cold this year.  :)  We'll see.  But I think there will be more people to adventure with either way, and I'm planning some good stuff.  Hopefully ideas meet reality.

Route here.

Finally getting into the BWCAW...

Kiwishiwi Lake at sunset...

Once and a while you get lucky with your schedule at work.  Usually I don't, as I'm a bottom of the seniority list regional airline pilot, and it's pretty hard to get what I bid for, (I know- complain, complain after taking tons of trips, sorry- I should shut up), but this month ended up pretty sweet due to a mistake in our bidding process.  Long story short, I got to name my days off this month, and it just so happened that Alison had a stretch of days off between flying trips herself, so we got 6 days off together.  Nice.  Seeing as we just bought our first canoe this year, it was time to get out into the BWCAW in Northern MN.  

We couldn't be picky about where we entered, as most people reserve their entry permits sooner than a couple days before.  :)  Oh well.  We ended up entering at Kawishiwi Lake.  Most people were avoiding this area as it was on the far eastern tip of the big P.G. Fire from last year, so there is a stretch of burn zone you end up paddling through early on.  We thought it would be neat to see though, and it was.  A sea of blackened dead trees, surrounded by new growth and lots of wildflowers.  The portages were pretty.  Didn't get any portage pictures though; sorry, I guess I was carrying a boat.  :)

Portage point at the north end of Kawasachong Lake...

Paddling the burn...

If you care to see on a map where we were- we paddled from Kawishiwi Lake, to Square Lake, to Kawawschong Lake, then portaged through Townline Lake to Lake Polly, where we spent a couple days/nights.  The first night we were tired from the day's journey, and got the last campsite on the Lake.  Being that most of the route was burn area, it funnels everyone into Polly or further and camping gets tight.  It was funny being out in a wilderness area and having it feel just like the populated Superior Hiking Trail.  Whether we're bike touring, backpacking, or canoeing, it seems like we're always fighting to find a place to sleep.  There sure are a lot of people in the world.

First Polly campsite in the morning...

The second morning at Polly, we snagged what I think is the choicest campsite- a small island right in the middle of the lake.  We thought it would be a great spot to chill out for a day, so we did.  We swam, napped in our hammock, cooked, fished, and then did more of the same.  Good to relax in the woods once and a while.  

We also got out for some good twilight floats close to camp during the evenings.  Loons calling all over, and fish jumping and the smell of campfires...

Paddling back between Kawaschong and Square...

Beaver dams call for a bit of quick grunt work...

The last night we relaxed some more on Kawishiwi before exiting in the next morning.  Chopped wood, burnt wood, ate food, looked at stars...

I did quite a bit of fishing during the trip (yeah, I started dabbling in this MN pass-time while out in our boat this year), and I watched pretty much every other party we met catch a ton of various fish, with not much luck myself.  I'm much more of a REI type than a Gander Mtn. type, but I did catch, fillet, and eat one small northern pike while out there.  Alison and I have become close to vegetarian at most times, but this is one tasty bit of animal food I enjoy occasionally.   I brought out some seasoning in hopes that I'd find a fish worth cooking up, and it was pretty tasty.  Plus, I think you have to do this to earn you Northern MN badge, so to speak.  

We had a great time floating the water paths of the BWCAW this first time, and will definitely go back when we have the chance between balancing work and so many other types of outdoor obsessions.  I found it to be very much like bike touring and backpacking, being that you are self sufficient, traveling/exploring places you've never seen, and don't have to return home for at least a few nights.  These tend to be my favorite times outside.  It takes some time to unwind and a few nights "on the trail" does the trick.