One nice thing about where I live in Sioux Falls is that geographically, bad weather often passes just to the north or south of the city. The areas all around us got pelted with a pretty good snow storm last night. I woke up to about 3" of fresh powder that had fallen. Underneath that was a layer of ice from when the precipitation started with freezing sleet. Made for very slick roads as the loose snow just slid around on the slick ice underneath. The plows had just started to hit some of the emergency snow routes, which meant most everything else was yet unplowed.

Certainly conditions like this are too bad to drive in, so I rode my bicycle instead. The air temp when I left the house was 6F. There was a 15 mph head wind which brought the wind chill down to -12F. The unplowed snow made me work hard to pedal through it, and the slow speeds meant I wasn't generating a whole lot of additional wind chill on top of that which was naturally occuring, so overall I stayed pretty warm.

The layer of snow was thick enough to hold the carbide studs on my tires up far enough so they wouldn't dig into the ice. That meant things were very slippery, especially in the spots where cars had mashed the snow into ruts. Felt my bike sliding around underneath me quite a bit, but I never went down so it was all good. I did have one close call where I hit a big icy rut hiding under the snow. I managed to get my foot down at the last millisecond so I stayed upright.

Coming down a big hill with a stop sign at the bottom, I could feel things were getting slicker the farther down the hill I got. In my rear-view mirror I could see a car driving too fast behind me, and I envisioned them not being able to stop at the bottom. I decided that if that happens I want them to be in front of me not behind me. I pulled over and let them pass. Sure enough, they got to the stop sign and slid right through into the intersection. Thankfully for them there was no cross traffic coming at the time. Thankfully for me I had the presence of mind to let them get ahead of me.

Once I got to the MUP I was pedaling through mostly virgin snow making my own path, so the riding got a lot easier as there were no ruts or drifts from umpteen cars driving through the unplowed snow. For a short while I rode along side a track made by a fat bike, but for a vast majority of the trail I was the first one to use it today. This made it a little tricky in a couple of spots where I wasn't able to see where the trails edge was located and accidentally rode off the trail.

Once I got downtown and left the MUP, the plows had already made their initial pass through the area so the final 1/3 of a mile was pretty easy pedaling.

I left the house 15 minutes earlier than normal, and arrived at work 5 minutes late. I still beat most of the people who drove their cars to the office so the 5 minutes wasn't a big deal. Took me 50 minutes total to ride the 4 miles, so certainly no speed records were broken.