Fat bikes aren’t usually our focus here at Dirt, but a few times in the last few months we’ve seen some amazing riders hitting up trials and trails on fat bikes, making them look really… well… fun. Rocky Mountain have just released the video above, and we get that if you put riders like Geoff Gulevich, Wade Simmons, and Brett Tippie on an ironing board they’ll make it look stylish, but this does actually look good!

If we call our bikes “mountain” bikes, then they ought to be capable of riding mountains, right? They’re meant to be all-purpose, and these fat-bike conditions kind of show normal bikes up. I know we don’t go to the beach every day, or find ourselves in ski resorts covered in powder regularly, but when you do… well, there’s kind of a point to these things!

Chris Akrigg released this a couple of months ago, and it’s the same concept – find a place where our specialised (as in narrowly defined, not the brand) types of mountain bikes get stuck, then show us that he’s a really good rider by making it look like a normal bike being thrown around.

And then there’s this video, by Nicolai, which has Frank Schneider absolutely flying around a bike park on a belt-drive fat bike. About as far from Dirt’s normal choice of bikes as you can get, but good fun all the same. Again, Frank’s just an incredible rider and if it were a normal hardtail he’d be much quicker and wouldn’t have to pedal nearly as much, but we’ll try not to mention that. It’s cool, yes, but unlike the other two videos with conditions where our normal bikes don’t work, bike parks are the realm where normal bikes surpass fat bikes hands down. Even with belt drives. Sorry Nicolai.

So is there something to be said for broadening our minds out of the woods and seeing the places where these wide-tyred Frankenstein’s Monster-Bikes work? I’m not convinced to run out and buy one, but maybe in the few days of snow we may or may not get, I might look at my “all-mountain” bike and wonder whether it’s all-mountain enough. Just maybe.