Fat Biking: A New Winter Pastime

The calendar shows that winter begins on December 21st, but it begins for me at varying times each year. In my mind, the sure sign that winter has arrived is the end of my two wheel riding. First, the Harley Lowrider gets put to bed, usually in October. Sometime in November, when the temperatures barely creep into the 40's or the first snow flurries appear, I winterize the BMW GSA and officially put and end to the motorcycling season.

In past years this has also meant an end to bicycling for the year. I live near the Fox River Trail and ride over 1000 miles each year, most of it on the trail. Riding a Trek road bike or a Trek hybrid, I spend many hours enjoying the riverside trail.

But once the cold weather comes I seldom visit trail until spring.

A couple of months ago I started thinking about the upcoming winter and what plans I had to make the most of it. Being retired for three winters now and not snow birding in Florida or another warmer clime, I knew that I needed to have something to keep me active. In past years I had done some cross country skiing. It was good exercise, but it meant loading up the equipment and driving to someplace to ski. The weather did not always cooperate, so in some years the skiing was not very good.

Over the summer I had seen more and more people riding what are called fat bikes. The bikes have 4.5 or 5 inch wide knobby tires and they are made to be ridden in soft sand or snow. Most of them are fitted with hydraulic disc brakes and one small front sprocket with ten or eleven gears on the rear wheel. Whenever I visited the local bike shops I would take a look at them. They appear to be tremendously heavy, but can be made fairly light with the right materials. I started thinking about the possibility of riding through the winter on one of these bikes.

One advantage of biking rather than skiing was that I could ride a bicycle on the trail I used all summer. The local municipalities had agreed to plow the trail, so I knew that as long as it did not ice up I would have a place to ride. One November night while downtown for dinner I visited a bike shop. As I was not dressed to ride it outside, the sales guy let me ride it around the shop. That pretty much set the hook for me and a couple of weeks later I was test riding one outside at a different shop.

This shop sells Trek bikes and their entry level fat bike is the Farley 5. It has a carbon fork and the other features mentioned earlier. The day after my test ride I called and told the salesman I wanted to pick up the bike later that day.

He said he would have it ready by mid afternoon and my wife gave me a ride to the shop so I could ride it home. After a quick rundown on the operation of the controls, a seat adjustment and a few maintenance tips, I was on my way.

The route home included a stretch along a county road without much of a shoulder. I was glad I had brought along my front and rear LED lights as the cars whizzed past me. The big tires on the bike allowed me to ride in the snow-covered gravel shoulder in a comfortable fashion. The air pressure in each tire was probably about 5 psi, and the big knobbies seemed to float over the track.

Once over the East River I turned north on the East River Bike Trail. It still had snow on it from the couple of inches that had fallen three days earlier, but it was a good chance to begin to get comfortable on the Farley.

I found myself looking for shortcuts through the woods when I reached Greene Isle Park. From there to my house it was mostly pavement except for a half mile or so on the Fox River Trail.

Later that evening I took my Schwinn Typhoon off the hooks in the garage and moved it to the basement. My intention was to hang the new Farley in its place, but those big fat wheels were not going to fit in those hooks. But after a quick stop at the local home improvement store I had bigger hooks and the fat bike had a new home. I have to put a tarp over the hood of my Toyota Tacoma now when the Farley is put away wet, but it is a small price to pay for the fun this new bike promises.