It was a good winter

At long last it seems like mud season has arrived and winter riding is over. This has been the best winter for proper snow riding that I’ve experienced, thanks to both Mother Nature and really finally dialing in my REEB Donkadonk. I’ve been having so much fun riding that I’ve neglected the blog a bit, but here’s a roundup of the snowy frozen fun that’s been going down the last couple months. 

My first proper ride of the year was coincidentally on Global Fat Bike Day up at Jefferson Valley just outside Toronto. I was booked to DJ a party in Tee dot that night so I brought my bike. It was snowing the whole drive over and conditions were loose and super fun out there. We had a great crew, I had the wrong tires, and it was just an incredible ride. The Jeff is sick!

The homie Brandon has been carving out time between fatherhood and jobs to ride. And throughout the winter the time that seemed to work the best was Saturday morning dawn. I only joined him for 1, here at Bald Mountain South / Lake Orion High School, but it was an incredible ride. Still just a little bit of snow, but the sunrise was gorgeous and it was my first time riding LOHS. And any ride with Brandon is a good one— we even saved the ride by fixing a puncture of his.

On the winter solstice my wife and I were able to get out for a ride. December vacillated between 45º and a few inches of snow, which means the snow would hit the warm ground and not fully pack up— you can tell from the pic. Still a great ride though! And I finally got the drivetrain dialed in on the Donkadonk with something normal (1x11 SRAM X01).

I found myself in Ann Arbor for something, so I decided to bring my MK4 over to a little punchy part of the local loop. If there’s not a ton of snow this bike is actually so good (a 29x3.25” front tire is a lot of rubber after all).

The new year arrived, which meant our annual Marquette winter biking trip was nigh. We kept hearing conditions were horrible, with the trails being literal ice chutes. We stuck with the trip anyway and just prayed for snow. Literally the day before we headed up north the snow started, and it continued slowly but surely our whole trip. Only a few trails were super sketchy (4-6” of snow on top of 2-3” of ice), but it was a great trip anyway. Considering that Marquette just got 14-18” of snow in the last 24 hours I’m thinking we should maybe plan our winter riding trip later in the winter.

After we got back from Marquette I found myself in the winter doldrums. After a few days I forced myself to just go out for a ramble, so I grabbed the beater and head over to Belle Isle. It ended up being a really nourishing ride for the soul. And where the second picture was taken was surreal. The ice chunks were coming in from Lake Saint Clair and making the most incredible sounds as they bumped into each other. I ended up sitting there for a good 20 minutes just watching the ice chunks float by. That visual has found its way into my meditation practice too… thoughts are just an ice chunk floating down the river…

In February we skipped town to the Philippines for a couple weeks. While we were gone the temperature really dropped and froze all the canals and lakes on Belle Isle. So when I got back I put my sunburnt feet into my winter boots (a truly unique experience and sensation), and went out for a local bimble. I didn’t have a plan other than to go to Belle Isle and jump onto some ice as soon as I could. What proceeded was one of my favorite bike rides of my entire life. I actually meant to dedicate a whole blog post to it, but this blurb will have to do. Riding out on the ice was such a trip— there was barely any rolling resistance, the sound was incredible, and it felt a little spooky especially going under the bridges. I didn’t have a route in mind but I just kept following one of the frozen canals as far as it went, and it brought me through a part of the island I never really knew existed. The only thing back there were coyote tracks and some downed trees that I had to bunny hop over. I ended up running into a neighbor and his two kids, and they were so stoked and wanted to ride my bike. I put the dropper post down and pushed them around while they hooted and hollered. It was just such a blissful novel experience. Big up the Detroit Ice Boiz for clearing some of the snow too.

We finally got some overnight snow here in Detroit. Funny enough Detroit seems to be a slightly warmer and less snowy microclimate compared to even just the surrounding suburbs, maybe due to the Detroit River and Lake Saint Clair? Either way, we got about 6-8” of snow, and it perfectly coincided with me putting my new custom fork on the Donkadonk. So I woke up bright and early to get first tracks on my typical 10 mile local loop. It was definitely one of those classic fat bike rides where you’ve never worked so hard to go an average of 5 miles an hour, but it was so fun to be basically the first person out there. My typical 55 min lap took 2.5 hours and blew up my heart, but it was tons of fun and really worth it.

My dad and I had a midweek Manistee National Forest escape on the books for a couple months. It happened to coincide with there being over 2 feet of snow up there. When we got up there it was more like 3 feet, and every morning had another 2-6”. I hadn’t seen anything like it since a trip to the Sierras to ski over a decade ago. On the first day the hope was to ride the big outside loop at Big M. I wasn’t able to decipher trail conditions online, so we loaded our bikes up and snowshoes. It’s a good thing we decided to bring the snowshoes because the outside loop had not been groomed at all. So we snowshoed the new Winter Vista loop, which was so beautiful! We were definitely the first people out there to snowshoe that loop in a while, so even with snowshoes were really working. On the way back to the parking lot I noticed that there was actually a groomed fat bike trail, so my dad hung out in the car for a bit while I went out and hit a lap. It was the flattest part of the trail but was still great to get out for a groomed ride. The next couple days we mostly stuck to compacted forest roads, which made for a really fun ride.

All winter it seemed like Holly was getting the most snow of anywhere in Southeast Michigan. So Brandon, Eliisa, and I got out to Holly Wilderness for what was the most fun groomed riding of the entire season. Big up Josh at Trail Sense for the incredible groom work. We were hauling bollocks and smashing the back to back turns. It was the first time I was able to get the custom fork up to some real speed on singletrack too. Plus the weather wasn’t bitter cold— we were all overdressed and dropped layers before the second lap.

I had so much fun up north with my pops that I was hoping Eliisa and I could get up there one more time before winter’s end. Fortunately we found a free weekend quickly. They had a few 50º days like down here, but when your base is 3.5 feet that still leaves you 1.5 feet of snow after the melt. On Saturday we went up to VASA since I was told they freshly groomed it Friday afternoon. The temperature dropped tremendously overnight, and the groom that we got Saturday was straight up white sidewalk. It would’ve been faster on our gravel bikes for sure. We had to keep adding tire pressure to prevent self steer, the groom was just that hard. Even the sidewalls of the groom were super hard, and you could carve them like berms without sinking it. It was truly sublime. I don’t know if I’ll ever experience a groom like that ever again to be honest. The next day I wasn’t planning to ride, but the nearby fire tower was calling. So I set out from the cabin and proceeded to put together a truly incredible little enduro loop, starting with a proper 419’ climb (huge by Michigan standards) on increasingly desolate forest roads and snowmobile trails, and ending with a 13 minute descent down more forest roads. When I got to the top of the climb there were no recent ORV or snowmobile tracks, and certainly no bike tracks. I just hung out up there for a few minutes to listen to the wind and nothing else. It was incredibly peaceful and gorgeous.

And then, of course, I put down my saddle, switched into a hard gear, and proceeded to pedal downhill as fast as possible. The duality of man.

Later this week I’ll post a bike check of my REEB Donkadonk now that I’m finally in love with it.

Enjoy mud season!