everything you ever wanted to know about black ice
 

This is a very cool page:

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~cliff/Roadway3.html

Thanks for the link. I rarely drive (once a year or less), but I have to drive over Santiam Pass this Wednesday to take a disabled friend to a medical appointment. Ugh, just in time for the snow/ice season in that area. Lucky for me, we only get ice in the southern Willamette valley once every few years. Since I am a real weather wimp, I just walk when the frozen stuff hangs around.

I looked at the article below the other day when preparing for possible riding in black ice and found it useful. Thanks for sharing this.

http://www.icebike.org/Articles/TechniquesBlackIce.htm

Ride safe,

Jeff

He's also got a blog entry w/ cool graphics describing low altitude (<2m) temp inversions that give icing on non-freezing (ostensibly) days:

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/1...your-life.html

Columbia Gorge makes a good funnel when its cold behind the Cascades,
and the off shore winds come out of the east, It ices up out west, at the Bar.

Black ice doesn't actually sparkle when illuminated. That's the problem. It doesn't look wet, even in glaringly bright sunlight. At worst, the road surface looks clean. That's your tip-off, since the ground has to be very cold in order to get water to freeze so invisibly... so odds are there was a road salt layer everywhere. If it looks like the roads are pristine all of a sudden, get really suspicious. The change can happen very fast, even at a walking pace.

Glare ice is the same sort of icy glaze, but it is shiny and sparkly. This is much easier to see, and since you can see it you can take action. Glare ice can form in a wide variety of ways, and often melts easily. Melting is bad, since then the ice gets much more slippery. There is no way you'd miss glare ice when walking, even in cloudy weather.

People in climates where icing is rare won't often make a distinction between the two, since the end result tends to be the same.

Yup, I've learned that. I'd rather drive on snow than on suspiciously clear pavement.

Of course, it helps to invest in winter tires, too; "all-season" tires are only half-optimal in all seasons. I didn't get studded tires, though..
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...i/IMG_3741.jpg

I wish he had made that post one week earlier! On Wednesday AM, same day that likely inspired him to write that blog, I turned off the bike trail I was on to cross a wooden bridge and fell down faster than I thought possible, right on my knee. I slipped again standing up; the whole bridge surface was slick ice despite the 38 degree air temp. Thankfully I didn't break anything but will have to take a couple weeks off while the bruises go away :(

I hate black ice.

I get out the bike with the studded tires, from Finland ..

With studded tires on my bike, black ice has become a non-issue. :-)

Now it's slushy snow that I'm the most leery of...I steer *towards* black ice on my bike with studded tires. :-)

Where I live, out in the country, a lot of people regularly ride horses on the road. I've gotta watch out for brown ice!

Is that anything like "Dont eat the yellow snow"?

lol...me too!

Everything you ever needed to know about black ice:

Slippery. Bike go boom.

Get studded tires.

Studded tires don't help much with that. Last winter, I went down 4 times on the same commute on that stuff, after the last time, I walked the rest of the way home, pushing my bike.