Fat Bike history
Published: November 26, 2006
In the snow on the wintery trails around Anchorage these days can be found the imprint of Mark Gronewald's success.
It is writ in the shallow chevrons of the print of a bike tire nearly 4 inches wide.
Years after Gronewald first advocated the fat-tire bike as a viable alternative for winter transportation and recreation, his vision is rolling up hills and dipping into valleys across Southcentral.
The FatBike, as Gronewald calls it, has arrived.
Visit almost any bike shop in Anchorage today, and you will find a fat-tire bike on display. Most shops display them prominently.
Unfortunately, it is hard to know whether to congratulate Gronewald or console him.
That's because the owner of Wildfire Designs Bicycles in Palmer -- builder of the FatBike that first attracted attention by tying for victory in the 2001 Iditasport Impossible human-powered race from Knik to Nome -- no longer drives the fat-tire phenomenon.
Gronewald is still in the FatBike business. He's subcontracted frame construction to DeSalvo Cycles in Ashland, Ore., but he's still building bikes, selling wheels and rims for fat-tire conversions and promoting winter mountain biking.
Surly Bikes hit the trails last year with a reasonably priced (at least by upscale mountain-bike standards) fat-tire that's built in Taiwan. The Surly Pugsley, as the bike is called, is the fat bike you'll see in most Anchorage shops.
"When you design bikes up in Minnesota you have to think fat, especially if you want a ride that can handle the Midwest's snowstorms and mud," the magazine Hooked on the Outdoors said at the rollout of the Pugs last year. "The Pugsley (is) a mischievous bike that rolls on super-pudgy 4-inch-wide, 26-inch rims. ...The Pugsley eats up snow and slush, but it's also the ideal ride for beach bums looking to cruise the sand or explorers looking to off-road the outback. Nature's worst will never stand in the way of your commute again."
Nice bit of revisionist history that conveniently overlooks Gronewald and bike builder John Evingson, once of Anchorage.
Both of those men have been playing with fat-tire bike designs for years. But Gronewald says the origins of the FatBike go back even further.
He traces the lineage to Texan Ray "El Remolino" Molino, who experimented with wide-tire bikes for riding on sand in the 1980s. Remolino modified bikes to accept super, extra-wide rims that could support monster tires. He eventually pushed rims to such widths -- three times wider than regular rims -- that special bike frames were needed to accommodate them.
"He was before me," Gronewald said, "and he had a couple prototypes before that. They weren't quite as refined."
Gronewald took the Remolino concept and started tinkering with refinements six or seven years ago. Eventually he had a reliable, solidly functioning FatBike. By the middle of this decade his FatBikes were cleaning up in the ultimate test of fat-tire bikes -- extreme races across the snowy winter trails of Alaska....
actually have a bookmark to the SF tide schedules that i look at each day:![DSC03735 [800x600].jpg](https://endless-sphere.com/sphere/data/attachments/30/30940-9a5f8f472a3cf2b0705fb32961b1c6a3.jpg "DSC03735 [800x600].jpg")
