Originally Posted by GriddleCakes

25ºF with a slight wind. The warm spell melted most major roads back down to asphalt, but there're patches of black ice everywhere from the refreeze. Took off from campus early today so that I can make it to a work meeting, so I got to ride home in the sunshine! I headed down to the MUP to see if it was rideable:

(pics clipped for brevity)

Yes, but in no way fun to do so. It might not look like it, but that trail is rock solid; I rode down it for a stretch and didn't make a mark, despite bouncing pretty hard over the frozen foot tracks. I guess it was too much to hope for that people would've stayed off the trail during the warm spell. Hopefully there's enough air left in the snowpack to allow the ski groomers to chew it down to level and smooth again. If not, it'll won't improve until after the next snow storm.

I tried to head down this alley early yesterday morning on my way to work, only to sink into 4 inches of dense slush and wallow to a stop, and then walk back and take a different route. Now it's frozen solid, and representative of a lot of back roads around town that weren't aggressively plowed before the storm. There're also 4-6 inch tall berms of frozen brown slush all over town, where plowing during the storm heaped up road slop that then froze last night.

Luckily, plenty of side roads look like this, which is actually fun to ride if you've got studded tires. This is right out front of my apartment building; I can literally ice skate from one end of my street to the other right now.