Jeff Ballweg

Madison is getting some truly unseasonable weather this week, as we managed to get get freezing drizzle, below-zero temperatures and enough snow to call a snow emergency in the space of about three days.  My commuter bike is a Surly Long Haul Trucker. It’s a great bike, but the stock tires are mediocre for touring, and nearly unusable on snow… so I rode my mountain bike to work a few days to get a little more traction. I’d been looking around for a set of studded tires for the Surly, but it’s rolling on 26′s, so I hadn’t seen any. (Mostly because I hadn’t looked too hard.) I happened to be at REI picking up some Christmas presents, when I spotted another customer wandering around with some 26 inch studded tires. They’d just come in, and a few minutes later I had a pair for myself. I put them on later that night, with only one catastrophic gunshot of a tube failure, but nobody called the police, and our hearing was fine a few hours later. Anyway, it wasn’t a day too soon, because this was the scene outside around noon today.

Looking northwest.	Looking northeast.
Looking southeast.	Looking southwest.

Forecast for tonight calls for 5 to 8 inches of snow, 20mph winds and a low around 4°F.

Then we get a break from the snow for a few days.