It's Monster Cross Season

What do you do when it's winter but you still want to ride your bike but you also don't want to ride it on the road like a normal person but you also don't want to get a mountain bike but you definitely want a completely different bike than anything else in your garage, the more niche the better?

Get you a Monster Cross bike!

The rules of what constitutes a monstercross bike are pretty loose. I don't even know if I'm supposed to spell it as one word or two. The internet isn't much help, some forums say it has to be a road bike with tires at least 45mm wide and spelled with two words, but I think you could just as easily get a mountain bike and put roadie components on 'er and make it one word. I guess I could hyphenate. Monster-cross? Ugh. Either way, the goal is to make a fat-tire, drop bar road bike.

For a long time I thought monster cross bikes were the silliest genre in an already excessively sub-divided bicycle market. My thinking was that road bikes and cyclocross bikes are fine for road and gravel and goofing off in public parks, but the wide world of the Off-Roading belongs to mountain bikes, with their straight handlebars and an upright riding position.

And while this is mostly true, mountain bikes position the rider to have a strong weight bias towards the rear wheel. This is so that the rider doesn't flip over the handlebars as easily when they're haulin' the mail down suicide hill and a log falls in their path (I'm sorta over-simplifying, but that's the basic idea).

But in snow, modern mountain bike geometry leads to a wiggly front wheel and poor handling, especially at low speeds.

A monster cross bike takes advantage of a mountain bike's big tires, but positions the rider to have a more even weight distribution between the two wheels. Even weight distribution results in better handling over ice and snow, and more control while cornering at any speed.

But a rear wheel weight bias does make it easier to do cool skidz...

Want your own monster cross bike? Well, you can buy one pre-made, like the Gorilla Monsoon in the pictures. If you prefer to put together your own bikes I suggest modifying a mountain bike from the eighties or early nineties. The cross country mountain bikes of yesteryear have very similar geometry to road bikes, so just put some drop bars up on 'er and there ya go. Drop bars give you more hand positions than straight bars, which means different weight distribution options. Put your hands all the way out on the brake hoods and you'll get better front tire traction, put them back on the flats and you won't slip out under torque as easily. Hands in the drops will lower your center of gravity a little, which is good over uneven ice.

The other way is to find an old steel cyclocross bike and bang away at the chainstays with a ball peen hammer until it can fit 28er MTB tires. I'll cover than in a future post.

OR! Get a time machine and go back to 1983 and hire Charlie Cunningham to build you a monster cross bike, thirty years before the trend!

That's what Jacqui Phelam did, and then she went off and won a million races with it.

But this is assuming that you actually want to ride all winter. It's cold out there! And besides, why ride when you can slide:

I pulled a muscle in my back doing this stunt, so you better enjoy it.