More on-carrying about the Pugsley

Click for big: I've never been on a mountain bike ride with this many people. I'm about mid-pack here. There were 19 of us on the HD trails Saturday morning, for the grand opening ride of the new LBS in the 'hood (which, btw, DOES have beer thank you very much): This Bike Life. It's a great shop, designed around the idea of building a little bike community. Very cool.

Anyway: I showed up for this ride on the Pugsley and in my jeans, expecting a chillaxed ride around the hood to the trails. But as kitted up dudes and their super bikes showed up, I got the feeling we'd be taking a real ride. The Pugsley did not slow me down.

The Hozan Rock Ring Wrench. If that's not great I don't know what is.
That is so great.

Fetish bike photo.
So, before I got this bike, I had the same misunderstanding of the capabilities that most bikey casual observers have -- and it's this: that the Pugsley is really for snow and sand. And that for everything else, it's just ok. I'm here to tell you: this bike is fun and super capable for all sorts of trail and dirt fun. I've taken to bombing a couple of my favorite sections of the HD trails in the last week. I can bomb on the Pugs, like I can on no other bike. There are two reasons -- that work together to make bombing super rad: zero worry of pinch flatting + monster grippage afforded by the ridiculous knobs/contact patch.

Hear me now or hear me later. But hear me!

Your basic falls photo. This trail just got knocked in. I'm thinking you'll be seeing a lot of folks lining up for photos in the future. I wanted to have the first Pugs shot.

Morning roll on the HD trails

Winter bikery

I'm a big fan of fixed-bike with studs for ice biking. Huge fan. Monster fan.
My ancient Velocity Deep-V gave up the ghost last year. So I'm waiting on spokes to build up some CR-18-rimmed wheels for this one. 

Midge. Not high enough. But good enough for 3 months of use. These bars may end up on the Pugsely. Sorry Glen.

First ride on the Pugs. Hard to tell from the pic: but it's cold as shit here.

Cold here too. About 10F. That's Joe. The tiny dot in the distance is Glen.

Hap-hap-happy with a frozen tear in my eye.

"Engage with the statue Maddie!"

Sign this

If you think the City of Spokane should have a rationalized plan for implementing bike/ped stuff.

Go sign this.

I've actually got a lot I could carry on about with this whole deal, but I don't think my carrying on would actually be beneficial. There's complexity and history here for me that makes teasing out a rational stance super difficult -- what I like about Barb's petition is that it doesn't seek to force the current "we're killing the bike/ped position" into a binary battle that demands a single solution -- the petition requests a plan and some specified leadership/vision from those eliminating the position. The current rationalization (essentially: "we're eliminating redundancy; we think bike/ped planning should be integrated into all of the job descriptions of planners/engineers in the city") is pretty much the reason a bike/ped position was created in the first place -- the story has ALWAYS been from planning/engineering that bike/ped is part of their jobs... which didn't exactly put Spokane on the bike nirvana map... aaaaaaand here I am carrying on. 

Go sign this

Numbers matter here. This petition needs at least 1000 signatures to have impact. I'm pulling that number out my arse, and the more I ponder it, the more I think the number is probably too small.

Because Stine asked...

... how I like the pugs so far.

Here's my response:

The pugs is great. But the attention to tire pressure cannot be overstated.

I took it out on the HD trails yesterday morning – tire pressure was prob around 6psi – fairly soft.  On dry trails that made for a sluggish ride: soft cornering, squishy stops… and damn slow. I just chalked it up to the “fat bike” thing and I figured that I’d get into it and really  love it for the snow. But it was hard to love.

THEN

We all went to 7 mile for Global Fat Bike day. Pat checked my psi and suggested higher. I ended up with 14 in the rear and 12 up front.  It was like a different bike. Fuckuing rad. Riding trails was a lot like it is on a normal bike – except the contact was insane. You can totally rail into corners because there’s a monster contact patch with huge stiff knobbies spaced far apart. Same with climbing. You can climb up everything w/out spinning out the rear tire. It was amazingly fun. Glen and I were both surprised that fat bieks are actually fun on normal trails.

Trails at 7-mile are great – as you know – lots of rock gardens and blowing a line doesn’t throw you off a cliff (like at HD) and it’s mostly flat, so you can tool around forever. As for lines – you don’t have to be so precise, which lets you go faster and get into cornering, which becomes the best part on these bikes. I never got even a hint of drift or tire rolling… good stuff.

(this part was not in my response to Stine)

After our ride, we stopped at Flying Goat. It was about 2 ish and fairly mellow in there. We told the front desk person were 10 people or so -- she said 30-40 minutes wait and walked away. 

We noticed a big-ass fire outside the bar on an attached patio, which looked like a pretty ideal place to hang out and drink beers. We asked the server about it, he said, "you can go out there, but I won't serve you."

Excellent.

Then we went out there and stood around the fire and noticed a friggin service window -- that goes right to the bar. Attached to the window was a curious sign: "This is not a service window. Please come inside for service." Attached to another door was another sign about how you shouldn't expect service -- or something similar.

It warms my heart to see the Bennidito's business model ("you don't really want beers and food do you?")  is sweeping the city, soon the nation... and eventually, the globe!  Of course this approach drives Pat insane, which is always fun to witness. So we had to take a pic before heading to No-Li, where we drank beers for a few hours reliving the epicness of our 1.5 hour bike ride.

My new bike

Thanks Glen.
story here.

Buried

This week of school is about as hard as any week I experienced in my previous life... well, the one before the most immediate previous life, which was chillaxville.

I dug out the yellow bike for my coast down to the bus this morning.