Black Ice, Now?
 

Today I rode up in the High County (mountains) and hit a patch of Black Ice and went down hard! (Lucky for me, only my pride was hurt.) Anyone ran into this stuff and if so, was it scary to get back on the bike and ride?

Both last year and this year. This year was worse since it was 40° out at night, and I figured that the MUP would be fine. Boy was I wrong. This whole melt/freeze/melt/freeze cycle we are having in Michigan is terrible. Well, I crashed rather quickly, since a fixed gear on slick 23's gets 0 traction on ice.

Try this thread:

http://www.bikeforums.net/commuting/...ble-enemy.html

- Andy

At the peril of opening another can of worms (see TransitBiker's link), I am astounded that people are surprised by ice in the winter time. It is still deep winter in the mountains, Colorado Kid, and if you are going to go riding a bike in the mountains, you should expect to see ice especially in shaded areas. I suspect, given long experience with the Colorado mountains, that the temperature was near freezing or had been so overnight. In other words, perfect conditions for water to freeze.

Most people don't go riding in the mountains this early for a reason. Stick to the plains for a little while longer or learn to recognize the signs of ice. If the road looks wet and the temperature is near freezing and/or the wet road is in the shade, expect ice and proceed accordingly.

I've put my studded tires away about two weeks ago, even though there are still regular patches of ice along my commuting route. For the past two weeks or so we had a lot of melting going on during the day and then at night everything would freeze. I've been riding my fixie with skinny CX knobbies on ice, including black ice and never crashed, not even once. There were few situations where things got really scary but I managed to stay up without crashing. Yes I had to slow down a lot, use a lot of caution and be extremely careful...but it's possible to ride ice without studs and not crash but it's defenitely not the same as riding with studded tires.

Being a mile higher than I Am , Makes a big difference.. here I had a good idea, commuting where the spring fed water was, running across the road a bit..

I have a studded tire fitted bike , I Only took it out to change the handlebars , this winter.

( found an old bull moose set.. & w LBS saw guide, cut them down narrower)

I have several other bikes , for thawed Water

I keep my studs on until it's consistently above freezing, for exactly this reason

Black ice is a late winter phenomenon around here. It gets warm during the day, lots of snow melts, and runs across the pavement during the night, when temperatures drop. It'll last another week, here, then no more. I've had some close calls! But to answer your question, no, you'll be fine. A little wiser, a little more wary, but you'll keep riding. :thumb:

40 degrees is just an average, air temp, recorded a few feet off the ground. Actual temp can vary 10 or more degrees. Anyone just riding around especially in the dark should know that you can ride through a low place and it's very chilly there. Unless it's been 20 degrees over freezing all night I assume there might be ice and watch for it.

eastern MASS snow pack is still pretty deep and 2 nights this week will be in the teens. can't count out the black ice for some time

I hit a patch a few years ago on a ride along a MUP with a friend just as it was getting dark, went down and slid maybe 20 feet on ice (a thin layer of clear freezing snow melt running across the path). No damage other than a bruise on the side of one knee. While I was catching my breath after the fall, I suggested that riding in the road might be safer, he borrowed my road bike and left me his mountain bike to catch up to him on saying it was easier to handle. I was a bit paranoid of hitting ice again, but focusing on playing catch up solved that problem. I thought it funny at the time that he wouldn't ride in traffic to avoid ice and blamed my fall on poor bike handling.

no ice for me, being from california. But I did go down hard in some unexpectedly loose gravel. The "was it scary to get back on and ride" bit is what I think translates over these two different scenarios. My bike handling confidence went way down, for awhile (it doesn't help that I was badly injured and was off the bike for months anyways). And even today I'll find myself handling everything just fine, and then all of a sudden focusing on some leaves on the ground, or debris, or even on the first rainy days when I rode and I just end up understeering like crazy because all I can think about is leaning too far over in loose stuff and eating it hard again... But that's mostly gone now. Was bad for a couple weeks when I was getting my bearings back.