Another Snow Bike! The Salsa Mukluk.

I’ve got a thing for snow bikes. Maybe it’s a grass is always greener thing. We don’t have snow here in Los Angeles. Up in the mountains sure, but this is the desert. A tamed desert at that. We have manicured green lawns that are fed by water from other states. So it’s hard to justify owning one of these strange bikes here. That doesn’t mean I don’t want one though. And I want one bad. I just got the chance to ride the Surly Pugsley for the first time last Thursday. It was so much fun, that I thought about just riding to the truck and speeding off. I figured we’d work it out later. It was my size, so why not right? Yesterday, to make matters worse, Salsa introduced the Mukluk. Damn! Another snow bike to consider? Wait, did I just say consider? Serbrina may be reading this. I mean lust after! I’m not considering it. I am not considering it!

Yeah, I’m considering it. Can you blame me?

The Salsa Mukluk frame is aluminum versus the steel Surly Pugsley. I don’t know how I feel about that, as all but one of my bikes are steel. Yeah, I’m kind of a bike snob, no relation. Both bikes use a steel fork, with the Salsa Enabler having braze-ons to carry racks and water bottles. The Enabler fork doesn’t have the bend that the Surly Pugsley fork has, which to me is better looking. There’s a reason though. The front is 135mm spacing, while the rear is 170mm. That means that if you want to switch the front wheel/tire to the rear, you need a spacer (which comes with the frame). This not a problem on the Surly Pugsley, because the front and rear are both 135mm spacing. The Mukluk is disc only, compared to the canti posts on the fork of the Surly Pugsley. I’m not so sure that canti’s would work that well though. That’s a huge tire to slow and I’d think that disc brakes would be the way to go.

I’d love to see one of these in person and ride one. I can think of some adventures that would be great on a bike like this. There’s a trail road in the sierras that takes up to a beautiful valley. The main problem is that there’s a lot of sand at the bottom of the climb that you’d have to ride through. I rode my KTM 990 up there a couple of years ago. I can see a Salsa Mukluk, loaded with some gear, riding here. That’s enough reason to get one right? Right?