Durango is no stranger to fat tires, but until recently, riders put on the brakes for a blanket of white. Not any longer.
With a fat-biking market growing at high speeds, wheels are turning and crunching snow faster than land managers can keep up.
But in Durango, riders and entities are working together, creating an example – a kind of winter utopia that could set the stage for the rest of snow country.
On Saturday, Jeff Estes and Wendy Aber, avid fat bikers and owners of Durango Bike Co., were breaking trail – so to speak – at the Durango Nordic Center near Purgatory at Durango Mountain Resort. While the Nordic Center opened for fat biking last year, Aber and Estes were busy putting some sweat into more trail development, breaking off the main ski paths and utilizing summer horse trails for a bike-specific experience.
“As a kid, it was always a bad idea,” Aber said as she was packing a meandering ribbon of snow through thick forest with her snowshoes, stomping up and down deliberately, conditioning it for riding. “But there’s something exhilarating about being on your bike in the snow.”
While the center’s 14-foot wide ski track can be groomed with a snowcat machine, for the narrow trails they are building, even a snowmobile is limited. There’s only one way to do it. Start stomping.
“Now, I know why (Estes) gave me snowshoes for Christmas,” Aber said.
They began coordinating with Nordic Center Manager Helen Low in fall and since have built single track trail and planned management.
The Nordic Center is a nonprofit operating a trail system laid out before stunning jagged peaks of the San Juan Mountains, with 12.4 miles of skiing operating on a lease from DMR and in agreement with other landowners. It’s allowed to make improvements to existing trails.
“It’s just a few kilometers,” Low said, “but we have plans for the future.”
Those few kilometers are milestones for other efforts around the country, and at a the fourth annual Global Fat Bike Summit in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, this January, Aber will be presenting on how people are working together to promote the sport.
“Anyone who is involved comes together once a year,” Aber said. “But mainly, it’s a lot of land management. There’s been resistance. So, how do we get fat biking accepted? How do we make it more accessible to people?”
There is a common misconception that fat bikes destroy ski trails, but that attitude is changing, and people are coming around. The reality is the sport is exploding. At the Nordic Center, some skiers were reluctant to share the trails, but a movement is underway.
“We have a lot more fat bikers this year than we did last year.” Low said. “We realized it really wasn’t messing up the trails.”
In places like Minnesota and Wisconsin, fat bikers take to frozen lakes. In Durango, riders can venture onto national forest access roads or pedal up a snowy canyon. Wherever there is snow, it’s there. There was a successful race series at the Nordic Center last year, and this February, an inaugural 10-hour Silverton Whiteout Fat Bike Race will take place above 9,000 feet in Silverton.
The Nordic Center’s groomed singletrack could be open as soon as this week, and Estes was the man for the job. A former professional snowboarder and mountain bike racer, he blends experience from both sports to create something new.
With the unused trails, Estes found a blank canvas where he could paint his vision of true fat-bike singletrack. His current masterpiece will drop riders down a sweeping forested turn through a glade before spitting them out on the cat track.
“You pretend you’re on a fall line on a snowboard, but you’re on a bike instead,” he said. But, he and Aber agree, it’s good to start slow. As a certain kind of fat-bike, singletrack pioneers, they are still learning. They pack trails, trim branches, tape routes, work some and ride some.
“The fun part is doing these thrill-ride hill sections,” she said. “You’re not always working. You do a little bit of work, and then you can play.”
Estes said as the sport is evolving, he’s seeing a need for variety, giving riders the option of upping their game. As a designer, he makes his fat bikes on the wild side of the scale. Flat pedaling is fantastic, but Estes is also thinking of drops, berms and logs.
“We have all the Nordic trails open, so if you want an easy trail to ride and go get in a work out, that’s there, but there’s also going to be some gnar’. We’re doing things that aren’t traditional in the fat-bike industry,” Estes said.
Aber, catching her breath from trail packing, said they’re getting good at building trails, but they’re also good at making things happen. The sport is growing on its own. They just want to help.
“I think we’re effective at getting people together,” she said. “We want to figure out how we can make this work – with everybody.”
bmathis@durangoherald.com
