Originally Posted by
cyccommute
Go to a beach. Ride across the beach on skinny tires and ride across it on fat tires. The fat tires are going to go much further because they don't dig in...or at least don't dig in as much and they don't have to shove sand away from the front of the tire to keep going. Snow is no different than that beach sand. The whole point of the fat tire bike craze is that they float on top of the snow rather than dig in.
When it comes to snow, no one width rules. I rode in one morning through a virgin 7" on narrowish CX tubulars and it was sublime. Tires cut right to the pavement. Wider tires would have gotten progressively harder and been less sucure. Now, going home was a different story, I crashes on one several mile stretch three times. I was OK as long as I could stay in a tire track but that was it. (Didn't get hurt at all, just very wet.) Yes, overall, wider tires would have done better that day, but the ride in would have been real work, not sublime. And the wider tires would have been heavier and slower all the time when the roads were not iced or snowed, being a lot less fun on that fix gear.
That ride in was one of the great rides of my lifetime. Well worth the challenges coming home!
Ben