Here are some of the snowmobile tracks I was riding on west of Sunriver:
And here's one of the hardpacked snow in the Bend Badlands, east of town. That's Horse Ridge in the background:
Might as well point out, I had the ideal campsite for a 29"er rider, even if I don't ride an Airborne:
Yes, campsite. I like to winter camp at least once a year, to keep in touch with my MN roots or something. Here was the temp. reading in camp the first two nights of the weekend. It's actually a couple degrees high: notice the reflection of the light bulb shining on the thermometer from less than a foot away:
Nokian Hakkapeliitta 700x45 Impressions
Besides the Central OR stuff shown in the above pics, I also got a few miles in on this tire in the Central WA snows over the New Years weekend (and encountered some snow on a local night ride last week), so I'm now starting to form some impressions about it. Been running it on the front of my KM, with the Kenda Klaw in back.First of all, the biggest surprise is how well this relatively narrow tire floats on top of packed snow without punching through. Maybe it's the increased diameter (versus 26") that makes the difference, but on Saturday I had little trouble riding down a slushy snowmobile trail that wasn't particularly well packed down. It had warmed up and started to rain on top of the snow, yet the tire still tracked reasonably well, and was very controllable when it did start to wander. I did wander around on the trail a fair bit, but never fell once. Traction wasn't as much as you'd get from a full knobby, but it was more than adequate for the conditions I encountered -- and of course this would only get better in colder conditions. Also rode a few miles on hardpack, and as you'd expect the sucker rolls fast, and thanks to the studs it grips very well on hardpack and ice.
On the 'biler tracks I was on, I ended up lowering the pressure to about 10 psi and it worked great, though the tire did slip slightly around the rim, putting the valve stem at a bit of an angle. In the future I'll try some tubular glue to try to prevent that. I had started out at more like 18-20 psi at the beginning of the ride, which wasn't quite as good for float and stability but still worked ok. If I were on singletrack with snow rather than pure snowmobile tracks I would have kept the pressure in the upper teens, otherwise 10-ish psi did perform better on pure snow.
Bottom line: a much better snow tire than I expected, and of course it's great on ice and hardpack. Not sure I'd trust it to an Iditabike situation, but for shorter rides it works pretty well, and with snowcat rims (too bad someone beat me to buying Mikesee's) I bet it would work in quite a variety of situations.
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