It’s a secret we don’t normally share with out-of-staters but one of the things we love most about Salida is its mellow climate.  Typically in winter, while the mountains — the mountains we can see from our living room window — are getting buried in snow, down here in the valley we’re basking in sunshine.  Don’t tell anyone.

Even when it does snow in town, it usually only hangs around for a day or two. The clouds blow away, the sun comes out and within hours we’re back up to 50 degrees. With the combination of warm sunshine and dry air, snow doesn’t have a chance. It almost seems to evaporate rather than melt, going straight from a solid to gas, completely skipping the liquid phase. Poof! Gone.

Which makes this past week kind of unusual.  The day after Thanksgiving, when leftover turkey, stuffing, and mashed potatoes still seemed like a good idea, a storm rolled in and we got a solid five-inch dump of fresh, light powder.  Looking for relief from gorging myself, I pulled out my fat bike for the first time this season to burn a few calories on the newly resurfaced trails.  As always, it was a blast plowing through the fluffy whiteness.  Ride done, smile on face, I figured that was the end of it until the next storm.  

But then something unfamiliar happened.  The temperatures dropped, the clouds hung around and it stayed below freezing for days, resulting in the snow staying on the ground.  Sweet!   So I brought the fat bike out for another ride.  Another great day out.

Here we are more than a week later, and the fat bike is still the ride of choice.  It’s still cold and remarkably, there’s still snow on the trails.  And with the number of hikers and fellow fat bikers around here, the trails are now packed firm like groomed ski runs.  While visually not the winter wonderland of freshly fallen snow, what the trails lack in beauty, they more than make up for in grin-inducing fun.  Nothing like the feeling of big 4.8-inch wide knobbies rolling along snow-packed single track at close to normal mountain bike, dry trail speed.

Riding in sunshine while another storm blows in over the Sawatch.

Fat biking, the perfect remedy for that holiday binge.