I have a friend who has one of these bikes. It's not a Dick's Nishiki, it's a European one, more specifically it seems to be a brand in Scandinavian countries (my friend is in Sweden). Anyway, this thing is basically a flat-bar road bike. Not really designed for off-roading at all. IIRC as they're designed for snowy countries, they take wider tires so that you can put on snow tires for winter.

They only make these in a disk version these days, but here's the website for it:

http://translate.google.com/translat...ld&prev=search