Unrelated to building bikes of the Fat variety, but an interesting post on Fat-Bike.com about IMBA’s new draft Fatbiking “best practices.” Sad that stuff like this needs to be drafted and stated at all but i guess it’s a good thing. I’ll just repeat here what I commented there which is about only one part of the draft – tire width and bike choice.
“The tire cutoff value is too specific and should be left out. For example, you can leave serious ruts if it’s soft condition snow or groomers even with a 4.5″ tire. Alternatively, if it’s early in the morning and cold, or on a well-packed groomer, a 29er with 2″ wide regular MTB tires won’t leave a mark at all! So there’s really no reason to make people feel like they NEED to buy a Fatbike in order to ride on the snow. They’ll choose the right bike and tire size for the given conditions (or they’ll be suffering and walking a ton!). Leaving it at the basics of having the OK to ride on private property, yielding to other users, and using common sense seems sufficient.”
ok…so i edited it a little bit to be clearer but no matter, same ideas.
I’m surprised that this is even an issue (Fatbikes on groomed trails or on snowmobile tracks). There’s no ‘damage’ of the trail bed, and there really doesn’t appear to be that many people out there riding bikes on the trails so user conflict should be negligible. Damage to XC ski tracks and skate ski corduroy, sure, I see the problem with messing up that if you’re sinking in too much, but what if Fatbikes could be allowed at XC ski areas before the groomers go through in the morning, or at the end of the day just before closing time when skiers aren’t around (or if they are, they aren’t paying for a ticket). Seems so easy! Could charge a season or day “Fatbike Pass” and make extra cash, and in the wee hours of the morning the groomer goes through and wipes any slight record of tire tracks away.
Well anyways…this isn’t a problem where I recently moved (yet). I appear to be the only person on a bike on the groomed trails at the end of Foresthill Road.
