Fat Bike World's is making it's very first trip to the Midwest on January 28-30th. Get ready for corn hole, a maple syrup breakfast, and world class fat bike riding in the beautiful Northwoods of Wisconsin. Also, find out how how New Richmond, WI was chosen as this year's host in a Q&A with the race coordinators. The 7th annual Fat Bike World Championships is presented by Borealis Fat Bikes and Pure Fuel January 28-30, 2022 in New Richmond, WI. The race events will take place at New Richmond Golf Course, New Richmond Nature Center, and 45th Parallel Distillery. Weekend events include the Bourbon, Bikes, and Brews Tailgate on Friday, Championship Race and Fun Race Saturday followed by awards and the Fat Bike Worlds After Party, and a community pancake breakfast on Sunday followed by the circuit race, kid’s race, and Omnium awards. Yeah, it’s a race, and some serious athletes show up to race for the title of World Champion, but plenty of people wear costumes, shoot whiskey and eat bacon on the course too. Try your hand at riding a fat bike, check out the vendors, enjoy a cold brew or a tasty local cocktail, listen to the band, and watch people slay laps on some killer trails and jumps. It’s for all types of riders and spectators, from the pro racer to the newbie, with categories and laps for each. More than anything, Fat Bike Worlds is about riding bikes and chilling with a group of awesome people! Bring your family and friends to this three-day festival, tucked into a small town atmosphere. Plan to make some new memories, and get ready for some all-out racing! Q&A with race coordinators: 1. How did New Richmond, WI get chosen for Fat Bike Worlds this year? Big Ring Flyers-Apex Cycling has had a number of members participate over the years in Fat Bike Worlds in Crested Butte, CO as well as last year in Pinedale, WY. Founder Dave Ochs always envisioned the race as a traveling show, and eventually struck up a conversation with multiple time Worlds finisher and BRF-Apex member Chris Stevens. When Dave approached Chris this spring about hosting in our hometown of New Richmond, we jumped at the chance. 2. Fat Bike Worlds includes an obstacle course, maple syrup breakfast, and corn hole; definitely a unique fat bike race! Why do you put this on and what do you want people to experience? We really want to get the community involved in the whole weekend of events and expose them to what fun fat biking really is. BRF-Apex has a strong presence in Western Wisconsin and we want to get as many people on bikes as we can. It's easy, it's fun, and it's good for you! 3. Where else has Fat Bike World's been hosted and what do you love about the fat biking community? Fat Bike Worlds has been hosted in Crested Butte, CO 5 times, last year in Pinedale, WY, and this year of course it will be in New Richmond. We love the fat biking community because there's something for everyone - whether you are looking for a casual ride to grab a few craft beers, a serious tool for maintaining your fitness, or a lycra-clad hard-core racer, you belong to this community. Last Year's 2021 Fat Bike Worlds Video To learn more about Fat Bike Worlds and for a full schedule of races and spectator activities, head over to their race website.

The Norpine Fat Bike Classic is fast approaching on January 29th. Enjoy the best of winter up north while riding through stands of old growth cedars on Pisten Bully groomed trails overlooking Lake Superior. The Norpine Fat Bike Classic has two distances: The Long Pine (30 miles) and the Short Pine (19 miles). The event is put on by the the Superior Cycling Association and all proceeds benefit the Norpine Trail Association. To learn more about the events, head over to the race website.

We had a plan. Not a good one. But we did officially have a plan. We would go on a four-day bikepacking adventure on gravel north country roads and hope that every single person we talked to on the phone was wrong. That was the plan. How Did I Get Here? I got into bikepacking because I’ve always loved the challenge and freedom I feel with every other kind of packing: backpacking, canoe-packing, hitchhike-packing, bike-canoe-packing, and scooter-packing (kidding about the scooter). Here’s why I was attracted to bikepacking. It gives you the ability to enjoy outdoor adventures at a faster pace than canoeing and hiking and in a more remote way than traditional bike touring on paved roads. The Plan We heard about a bikepacking route in Northern Minnesota called “Straddle and Paddle” from my favorite website, bikepacking.com. It promised everything I could want: endless gravel roads, thick lake-y forests, and the world’s best donuts. So seven buddies and I spent a year researching, buying gear, and generally overanalyzing the entire trip. But planning is half the fun, right? The Problem There was only one problem. Campsites. No, campsites themselves weren’t the problem. I mean, we found campsites, but the vast majority were booked, and the few remaining were non reservable. It was the weekend of several very large tourist events in the area. The events were cancelled because of Covid but the crowds still came en masse. I refreshed the reservation websites every day for months. And we made phone calls. Lots of phone calls. We called the forest service, campgrounds, bike shops, and churches. Over the phone, they all had the same answer. “We’ve been booked for months and haven’t had one single cancellation.” One kind-hearted person even told us, “You literally chose the worst weekend of the year. This is our single busiest weekend and you’re not going to find a campsite.” “What if we just show up to campgrounds?” I asked. “You can try”, she said. “There are a few first-come-first-serve sites, but I doubt you’ll get one”. With eight hearts full of unfounded hope, we embarked on our trip despite having not just one, but three nights with nowhere to stay. The Arrival Night One: After navigating the winding gravel roads and eating a greasy burger at The Tressle Inn, it was time to find our first place to sleep. There was one single non reservable campsite in the vicinity of our first destination. That’s right. You didn’t read one campground; you read one campsite. Not good odds, I’ll admit. But we had no choice. So we got to the end of the trail and the forest broke open to a stunning campsite on gorgeous Windy lake...and no one else was there! We got our first campsite. We swam, we fished, we ate freeze-dried meals, and we couldn't believe that the prettiest campsite we’d seen was just waiting for our group of hopeful bikepackers. Night Two: Our odds would improve but the circumstances wouldn’t. Our bike ride for the day included a lunch swim on Mistletoe Lake as well as a friendly bear sighting. For the night, we were aiming for a tiny campground of four sites at the Cascade River Rustic Campground. More sites than the previous night, but we’d be arriving on a Friday which is the hardest night of the week to get a campsite during the light season and this would be the peak of the busy season. We rolled in after a tiring day on Minnesota’s loveliest and crunchiest gravel hoping that just one site would be open. Here’s what we found. Site 1: taken. Site 2: taken. Site 3: taken. Site 4: Open! We got lucky again and our band of bikepacking brothers just barely scored a second campsite in two days. Night Three: Beautiful Grand Marais. This would be a tricky one. If we didn’t find an open site at the municipal campground (which they assured us we wouldn’t) then we’d have to bike 4 miles back up the Gunflint Trail (Gunflint Trail? More like Gunflint Mountain...) to look for dispersed camping in the dark, dense National Forest. It was technically an option, but nobody wanted to do it. We rolled up to the campground in the pouring rain and they let us know that they were almost completely full for the night...except for 2 campsites. Luck was on our side again as we completed 3 nights in a row of extremely unlikely campsites. We woke up the last morning and stopped at The World’s Best Donuts on our way out of Grand Marais. We enjoyed those sugary rings of dough as the waves lapped onto the shoreline. Our final day of biking treated us to lakeviews, river gorges, and many wonderful miles on the Gitchi-Gami Trail before making it back to our vehicles. Thank you, Minnesota, for the incredible trails, delicious donuts, and enough luck to get 8 guys through 3 nights without a solid plan. Bikepacking Cook County: If You Go. Bikepacking Northing Minnesota is wild. The gravel roads and mountain bike trails are abundant and the options are endless. If you’d like to embark on our route, start at bikepacking.com/routes/straddle-and-paddle/. There are many different variations you can take and the trip overview gives fantastic suggestions for campsites, burger joints, swimming holes, and an optional paddle in the Boundary Waters. The route is best accessed between May and October and can easily be adapted to be anywhere from an overnighter to a 5-day epic week on the trail. If you go on this route, please take extra care in following leave-no-trace principles. There are many visitors to the National Forest and it’s important to preserve the outdoors for future generations. My last suggestion? You guessed it. Plan ahead and make sure to set up at least one or two campsite reservations. Want more? Check out the adventure film, “Gitchi”, that we made of this trip to see our exact trip and the great experience that we had.

The 906 Adventure Team is gearing up for the 2022 Polar Roll on February 12. As usual, the event is full of a challenging variety of fatbike and snowshoe events and of course...bacon. In this interview, I chat with Polar Roll Race Director, Todd Poquette. Todd is well known for creating new categories of pain as well as community. The crew in Marquette Michigan works harder and takes bigger risks to come up with new ways to create memorable bike adventures. We talk about his philosophy around challenging adventures, how bacon became an on-course staple, and what exactly makes the Polar Roll such an icon. All photos by Ryan Stevens Photo @ryanstephensphoto Todd, where did the Polar Roll idea even come from? We had this local fat bike event called the “World Snowbike Championship” or something like that. It piggybacked a large nordic event in the community and covered nothing but nordic ski trails. I kept asking myself and a few others the same questions: “Why the heck are we piggybacking a ski event?” And “Why the heck are we going to crown someone the World Snowbike Champion for winning a road race?” It just seemed sacrilegious and boring. Here we are in Marquette County, Michigan, on the edge of a fat bike boom, and in a community that is setting the standard for fat bike grooming… and we are gonna host a world championship on ski trails? NO. You should always ask yourself “What can we do that no one can do better?” In Marquette, the answer was simple: create one helluva lotta snow and groom trails specifically for fat bikes. That was the vision in its most simple form. Step 2: Identify a course. I wanted to link trails groomed by RAMBA and NTN to create an epic P2P adventure. I also wanted to see the communities work together (west end and Marquette). We are like every other community, we have our little weird politics and special groups. I felt the more we could bring the two sides together the better things will be for everyone. I’d say for the most part the majority of people bought into it and continue to buy into it still today. Step 3: Identify who this event is for. This was the beginning of how Polar Roll and the rest of our events have set themselves apart. We looked at Polar Roll as more of an adventure, not just a race. You know what makes an event a race? Two people lining up side-by-side with one goal - to kick the other person’s butt. What I’m saying is, you can create an experience for everyone and make it accessible to everyone, and you’ll still have 10% of your field show up solely for the chance to race. We’ve always promoted “race it or ride it”. People should be able to come to an event and experience that event in whatever way will best serve their needs and interests. Polar Roll has always been and will always be more than just a race… it’s a freaking adventure. What’s up with the on-course bacon? I mean… it’s bacon! There’s nothing else to say. I’m kidding, there is. So Chris Holm and a crew from the “Tuesday Night Rieboldt Ride” group decided to put an aid station out on the course, most likely because our events don’t offer aid stations. We tell folks they’re self-supported, but it was never intended to mean you couldn’t get help from someone, it just meant WE weren’t going to help you. Chris and his crew set the bar that year. They absolutely crushed it. It was another moment in life, for me at least, that if you pay attention there’s always something to learn, sometimes in the most unlikely places. I wanna say they set-up about 4-miles from the finish line - and you could not have predicted how perfect it would be. Riders were coming into “Hugs & Bacon” literally crying for their mommas. The course was brutal! They’d roll in and the first words uttered are “I’m done!” or some other iteration of profanity laced exhaustion. But then they had some bacon, and after bacon they drank whiskey, and after the whiskey they had more bacon, and then more whiskey. They’d go from DONE to LETS DO THIS in three shots. It was magic. Well, bacon and whiskey if I’m being honest, but I saw something that day…. Actually I saw a lot of things that day. I watched people come together who you’d never expect to see together… and in my view it was the adversity that brought em’ together. Their differences didn’t matter - what did matter was getting through that course alive. And the aid station… I saw how grateful people were to receive help when they needed it and didn’t expect it… and I saw the people who offered that help feel genuinely good for doing something for someone else… and getting nothing back in return except a sincere thank you. I guess you could say bacon brings out the best in us. What’s the snowflake challenge? It sounds wimpy. The snowflake challenge is just another stupid idea we came up with last year as part of the EX format, EX meaning EXPEDITION, meaning you literally are on your own. EX was our answer to the pandemic. We were extremely fortunate to find ourselves in the position we were in when we needed to #adapt. I recorded a video on my phone and basically told people “Listen, we’ve been telling you for six-years you’re self-supported and on your own, it’s for real this year! We were one of the few events to operate that summer and since then the format has blown up. We have been able to reach a whole new group of people… but I digress… you asked about the Snowflake. You have to complete the EX-30FB (fatbike), EX-30SS (snowshoe), IQ Test (duathlon), and a Director’s Choice. Complete them all and get a hand forged belt buckle. Easy! You have a lot of great photos of people falling in the snow. How much pain should riders expect? Pain is overrated and temporary. I wouldn’t be too worried about pain to be honest, but I would be worried about mind games. We looooove mind games. I can’t tell you how much joy it brings me when someone calls and says “Hey, you sent me the wrong gpx file… I signed up for the 40 but the file shows a 60-mile route…” and then I laugh… because they have the right file. It’s what we do. Routes are never what we say they are, and never short! I have this little slogan I like to share with people “Life isn’t fair. The world isn’t safe. There is no finish line.” When you come to a 906AT event you are going to be tested and have to prove you can prevail when everything is literally stacked against you. ANYONE can be successful in a controlled environment where everything HAS to be fair, and the RULES are leveraged to make an experience predictable. THAT’S EASY. If that’s your deal, cool. BUT IT’S NOT OURS. We joke about pain, and ya it’s gonna hurt at some point, but it’s so much more than that… but I hate to even try to articulate it… because I think you have to experience it. You have to give it a chance to change you. You have to give yourself the opportunity to prove you’re better than you believe you are… and that’s really what it comes down to for a lot of people…. They don’t believe in themselves…. So they need a kick in the butt… I’m kinda the friend you don’t want…. But need. I just want to see people succeed, see a life they didn’t envision for themself, and have the balls and fortitude to go after it…. And never stop going after it…. Regardless of how far they have to go… or who’s toes they might step on… THERE IS NO FINISH LINE… If you are not where you want to be today…. KEEP GOING. DO NOT QUIT. Be honest, do you hope for great weather or terrible weather? I ALWAYS WANT THE MOST TERRIBLE WEATHER. "Double Trouble" and "The Duathlon" both sound horrible. How horrible are they? I like to look at stuff like this as an opportunity for personal growth. That’s why we are always changing routes, courses, venues, rules, etc. No idea is off limits. The first winter duathlon we offered was the IQ Test. That is our EX-15FB in one direction immediately followed by the EX-15SS… and you must complete both in 24-hours. That was fun. Funny story… Roy comes up to the long snowshoe with his son last year. They proceed to crush it and document the adventure with photographs along the way through Facebook. One small problem - they didn’t wear snowshoes for the snowshoe event. So I had to disqualify him and his punishment, if you want to call it that, was that he’d have to come back and do it again with me, but this time we’re doing both the EX-30FB + EX-30SS back to back… and I called it the Duathlon for Dummies. That’s the stuff we do - we make fun of ourselves. Which is refreshing these days because it seems like people are really losing their sense of humor… and if you lose that… it’s all downhill from there. And everyone knows how much I dislike downhills… Double Trouble will be great, until it isn’t. Are they horrible? Sure. Learning how to persevere and smile when thinks are absolutely fricking horrible is a skill everyone needs to learn. 906 Adventure Team always seems to have ambitious goals. What’s coming down the pipe for 906AT? More Adventures. More Adventure Teams. We never rest. Good is not good enough. This year's event takes place on February 12, 2022. If you want to learn more about the 2022 Polar Roll, first ask yourself, are you absolutely sure? If so, head on over to their race website here.

In early 2021, Scott Haraldson and his friends took on Bikepacking.com's new Mammoth Gravel Loop. It's a 105 mile route with 75% of it being upaved. Just for fun, they added another 75 miles to make it a 3 day, 2 night loop. See their trip video and stunning drone shots in Scott's most recent film. Mammoth Gravel Loop Route Details:

Every year winter comes around and I talk myself out of getting a fat bike. I remind myself that last year we didn’t get that much snow and I probably won’t get enough use out of one anyway. It would sit in my garage while I run my cold errands on the studded tires of my all-road Kona Rove ST. Then came 2020-21 which included: 1. A global pandemic 2. Minimal travel 3. Everything that’s fun was closed And of course: 4. Plenty of soft beautiful rideable snow That was all fine and good except for one little problem: Fat bikes were sold out everywhere. A few friends jumped on the train early enough, called a bunch of bike shops all over the state, drove a couple of hours, and snagged one while it was still early. I wasn’t so quick to the punch. You already know what happened next: The snow fell, the fat bikes went out en masse, and I twiddled my thumbs with more than a little jealousy. But to be honest, winter has always been a favorite season of mine for cycling. Hardly anybody else is out, the frosted trees and trails are beautiful, and (if dressed appropriately) the cold, authentic wind on your face feels amazing. So I resolve to get out anyway...even though I’m riding the “wrong” bike. My Kona Rove ST isn’t a fat bike but it is: a.) Equipped with studded tires for the ice and b.) Tons and tons of fun on the snow. I regularly get out to ride weekly for coffee runs, trail riding (not groomed fat bike trails though, of course), social rides with a friend… ...and generally just messing around on a fun bike during a beautiful winter season.

One of our family traditions for the last several summers has been biking to a local pizza farm. Pizza is an easy crowd-pleaser, but it tastes even better in a wood-fired oven at the farm with ingredients that were just picked. Farm to Fork Retreat is a pizza farm that is the perfect distance for a dinner bike destination. We live in the middle of Eau Claire and it’s about 20 miles door-to-door. This gives us plenty of time to work up an appetite while taking in the gorgeous hills, overlapping farms, and woodsy country roads that we love about Wisconsin. Biking With Mom Just a few weeks before this trip, our family got a trail-a-bike. We already do a lot of biking and our 3-year-old has learned how to ride a pedal bike by himself, but the trail-a-bike gives us the freedom to go much further than he could ride in one trip. After installing the trail-a-bike we realized his feet couldn’t quite reach the pedals so we strapped on a few wooden blocks and, voila, we were in business. I (Dad) pulled a Burley trailer with our 10-month-old twins and got to take some video shots of our son spending quality time with Mom on her maiden voyage pulling the trail-a-bike. He didn’t exactly offer a lot of physical assistance propelling the bike, but was definitely an entertaining sidekick. The bike adventure to the pizza farm was pretty exciting for him. He sang songs, talked about imaginary wild animals the whole trip, and didn’t even complain about getting too tired. Halfway through the trip, he said, “Mom! I know a faster route to get to the pizza farm!” And she said, “What’s that?” “Driving!” Getting To The Pizza Farm When we get over the last hill, and can see Hwy 10, the thought of wood-fired farm pizza gets real. And it’s a good thing that we’re excited for pizza because the gravel driveway is steep and we need a little boost to make it up to the farm. We’re always welcomed by familiar faces, friendly farm dogs, and a cold beer from the beer barn to reward us for our journey. We usually meet up with friends and run around the farm throwing a frisbee, racing across the lawn, or, on this trip, flying a drone overhead for some aerial video shots. Wow! What a beautiful area. Leaving is hard In just a few hours, we settle into enjoying life at “farm” speed. The giant campfire is roaring. Dessert pizza is making us feel tired. The setting sun makes the fields glow. But we’ll be back. Sure, we could just order Dominoes. But pizza tastes better when you bike to it.