Is This Our Winter?

A week ago I was wondering where winter was as I slogged my way around the park on muddy trails and now I have my answer. It is here...sort of. The cold has arrived along with a dusting of snow, but nothing that would qualify as accumulating snow.
The muddy trails are now frozen solid and will more than likely remain that way until spring. The Park District is making snow now on a 24 hour basis and the trails around the chalet are buried under several feet of artificial snow.
For the past month or so I've been riding my "LITTLE" mountain bike, as I like to refer to it. Night riding through the woods has been a good deal of fun and I look forward to much more of that.

Today, I finally got the 29er back out on the trails. It felt great to be riding the single speed once again. The temperature when I started was 18 F and by the time I finished more than three hours later it was a balmy 25 F.It appeared for the most part that I had nearly the entire park to myself. I did see one other set of mountain bike tracks on the trails heading to the north end of the park, but aside from that cyclists were nonexistent. I did see some runners out on the paved trails along with some folks walking dogs, but other than that it certainly was a quiet day.
Before long these trails I rode on today and all summer long will be covered with snow, groomed, and full xc skiers. In the meantime. As long as they are open and free of snow I will continue to ride them as much as possible.

Looking towards the future...components for the Pugsley continue to arrive and I should see another delivery on Monday and then hopefully I can actually get on the with the business of getting it built up. I'm still trying to decide on what type of crank to put on it and I think that I will end up going with the Surly Mr. Whirly ss crank. It will allow me much more flexibility down the road should I decide to go geared at some point in the future. For now, I fully intend to build it up as a single speed.

PLEASE SNOW!!!!