I was so excited to ride this morning! The main trail along the river was great--it must have been plowed--so there were only patches of ice, totally doable for my hybrid bike with regular tires (700x35). It was about 32F, some wind.

But the real challenge came when I got to the gravel section. Nothing was plowed, tons of ice and ruts and . . . texture. It was boneshaking! I was able to ride on some of it, but I chose to get off and take streets (residential with bike lanes, pretty nice) the rest of the way to work.

Coming home was intense! I was optimistic that with highs in the mid-40s that all the ice and snow would be gone by afternoon. No such luck. I tried to ride for a while, but the weird, squishy, slippery deep snow and lots of thick ice just made it too squirrelly. I need to look into the Cyclocross Training that others have recommended to me, I think that would help me build a skill set where I'd feel more comfortable keeping myself and the bike upright.

So I ended up walking the bike a couple miles through that weirdness (and got pretty salty when I saw a lone fatbike trail cutting its way through everything like it was nothing! pah! I'm jealous!). Everything was fine once I got to the main (paved) MUP, and I was able to ride the rest of the 6 miles total back to my car.

From what I can tell, I'm not sure that studded tires would have made that much of a difference? Because the snow was about 3-4", and it's my understanding that once you get above about 2" of snow, you need a fatbike tire.

I should look into writing the city that maintains that section of trail and ask why they don't do snow removal. I imagine, because of the gravel nature of the path, plowing would potentially destroy the trail.

Anyway, I had a nice long amount of exercise and fresh air this afternoon, my 30 min ride took closer to an hour. But that's cool!