In an effort to ensure that it never snows or freezes again, I decided to make use of my New Year's work holiday on Monday by switching my mountain-bike tires over to studded type for the season. I mean, it's January - about time right? Never mind the fact that we've yet to have snow stick around for more than 8hours in this whole winter season so far. Even more impressive, as I sit here and type this, we just broke the all-time high temp. record for today by five degrees. Spring must be right around the corner?
Wheels off, Ridgelines waiting to be removed. I think I might replace these with some more aggressive tread in the spring. They've been to Moab twice and work great on the hardpack/slickrock out there but are far from happy in the loose stuff here. -Not shown: the oil reservoir on my rear brake handle started leaking while upside-down. Yay.
Continental Spike-Claws back for another season. At the usage rate these are seeing, they'll certainly die from age before they wear out.
Conti's installed and ready to roll. A quick test-ride in the house confirmed what my memory said when it reminded me that these are a death-trap on hard surfaces, almost like riding on ice with regular tires.
Later that day, Cody informed me that he recently bought a slackline. "WTF Awesome!" I said to myself. I've been thinking of doing the same for quite a while. Some trees were found and a test-setup was made. After about 30-45-minutes at this, we'd gone from: difficult to get one step on to walking/stumbling about half of it repeatably. Not too bad I think, half a day when it's warm enough to stay out would make easy work of walking the whole thing.
Cody giving it a whirl.
Me walking out. I think this was one of my later attempts after I had to put my shoes and socks back on. I had minor issues with my toes being completely numb when going barefoot for a while. The temp. was something like 19°F and the wind was blowing like crazy. Barefoot is definitely easier though.
I had a picture on my phone that I almost forgot about. Corrine and I checked out a new liquor store (Saturday I think?) which looks like some combination of a gas-station and a warehouse inside but has a really impressive selection of stuff. I had to photograph this huge Grey-Goose bottle. The small brown bottle to the right of it is a regular size 750ml of rum.
