Oslo just hasn't been a proper winter city this year. After three weeks frozen, its been going back and forth between snow and rain. Quite a mess on the way to the daycare, but the conditions were nearly perfect during the commute from the daycare to work. On most days I chose to use the Nihola with less-impressive gearing and the Schwalbe Snow Stud, to benefit the commute part of the daily journey.
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Harmless looking, but difficult. That rut took some effort, but the hill was climbed.
Slope less than 10%, one kid, perhaps 6kg on the rear. |
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This was especially nasty, hard to drive on even when level, and it packed into the tread.
Spinning solved nothing here. Having two kids in the box didn't make it easier. |
It turns out that really dense snow, stuff which is transitioning into slush and ice via rain, is really a challenge on a hill. It drags on the tires, and digging might never reach down to anything better. It seems that bikes have an advantage here due to better weight distribution and more tire per unit of mass.
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| Parking lot slush. I should have taken a picture of the ice that followed. |
On level ground, slushy snowy crap can be much deeper and rutted without causing too much trouble. But remember to rock the trike to "push" past the worst parts.
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| Looks like snow on top, but it transitions to dense slush. |
It doesn't take a lot of dense snow underlain by slush and ice to cause a problem on a climb. The stuff I encountered was really heavy, so just getting the tires through it was a challenge, but if the rear tire dug much it would just come to some sort of dense semi-slush ice. On level ground it went well enough.
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My son eagerly does a bit of cleanup. This gate is kind of irritating in difficult conditions.
Slope is as much as 15% through here. |
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| Picking up my son after a daytime snow flurry. Clean snow isn't a problem. |
This period has nicely illustrated to me that I am dependent on someone to do at least a halfassed job of snowplowing on the steeper sections of the climb to my son's daycare.
