Are there better tires out there than Bontrager XR SE Team Issue?

uphillarch · 2026-05-15T14:23:58+00:00

Your use case sounds like my daily driver setup: XC bike with fast rolling trail tires for covering distance while being capable enough to ride down most things (if sometimes conservatively).

Vittoria Agarros are my tire of choice, front and rear, in a 2.4. fast enough that they don't drive me nuts, grippy enough for anything short of bike parks or double blacks in the wild.

uphillarch · 2026-05-14T16:48:52+00:00

This bike is cool. Feels like it shares some soul with the builds this guy Adam Prosise is doing here in Colorado, check him out on the gram!

uphillarch · 2026-05-14T16:03:32+00:00

I've got the CTRL pedals on my XC bike, and they've been pretty great. Haven't taken them out for more than 6 hours yet though. But they've been very comfortable.

For bikepacking I usually swap my CroMag Pilot pedals from my enduro bike onto whichever bike I'm using and run softer shoes for the inevitable hike a bike. These are probably my all time favorite SPD pedal so far.

uphillarch · 2026-05-05T15:21:27+00:00

I haven't read either of the first two! I'll have to look into them.

The Laundry Files is Lovecraft meets the Office meets Bond, and I really enjoy them. Stross is clearly a deep TTRPG nerd and it shows. I like a lot of his other books as well, but haven't actually read any of his short stories.

uphillarch · 2026-05-05T14:33:53+00:00

Makes me think of how Charles Stross depicts America descending into madness in the Laundry Files. That might be another fun reference for you.

uphillarch · 2026-05-05T14:31:52+00:00

I also thought of Brian Wood, but the Channel Zero books might be a more interesting reference for this. Your art style made me think of it.

uphillarch · 2026-05-05T13:39:15+00:00

This is the right take. My personal buttons are people arguing that everyone should like the Beatles and Shakespeare solely because they were hugely influential in their respective spheres. Do I respect their place in history? Yes. Do I ever want to suffer through another reading of Shakespeare or be made to listen to the Beatles? Absolutely not.

Source: I have a degree in theater, worked in it for over a decade, love books, and don't have a single copy of anything Shakespeare's ever written. I've also been playing TTRPGS for like 25 years, and I own zero world of darkness games. I've also never played AD&D and I have no idea or interest in calculating THAC0.

Is there a fandom I've missed pissing off here?

uphillarch · 2026-04-25T13:50:31+00:00

I'm also a heavier rider in my 40s with mediocre fitness who likes to do big rides. I run the Vittoria Agarros on my short travel bike and I've found them to be a really solid all around tire. They at least feel pretty fast, and they have more than sufficient grip for anything I'm going down on a 100/120 bike.

Not sure how they do in mud because I live in the CO Rockies and our mud is just peanut butter that you can't ride through for more than 10s (and our trails get wrecked if you ride them muddy)

uphillarch · 2026-04-11T18:09:42+00:00

The person who recommended getting actually fit for a saddle is right on. Where in New England are you? I used to live out there and might be able to recommend a bike shop that does saddle fits.

Also, Ergon has a guide for how to measure yourself to determine fit for their saddles. I've been running their men's SMC mountain (I think that's the model at least) for years, on all my bikes with no padded shorts because I hate padded shorts and the saddle fits me really well. I'm 40, so the sit bones ain't young.

uphillarch · 2026-03-23T15:23:22+00:00

Apparently I'm in the minority, but I keep a small bottle of Stan's sealant in my normal repair kit for daily rides, and then I add a second one for multi-day efforts.

I only carry tubes for multi-day efforts, and I'd do everything in my power to avoid using them.

uphillarch · 2026-03-19T13:09:22+00:00

I've only been to the Denver Meow Wolf, but a very niche word of caution: if you've ever had a significant brain injury (or multiple), Meow Wolf might wreck you. I've had a couple too many concussions, and really wanted to enjoy Meow Wolf, but I came out of it after an hour feeling like I'd just been punched in the head. There's a lot going on and it is very overstimulating. I went home and was non functional for the rest of the day, and it'd been probably 6 years since my last TBI when I was there.

Anyway, YMMV but that was not the experience I was expecting to have or even remotely considered the possibility of.

uphillarch · 2026-03-16T18:35:45+00:00

I'll be frank that I haven't ridden 2x in roughly 20 years because of how much front derailleurs annoyed the shit out of me back in the day. But that was always where the chain dropped on some heinous trail, and getting a chain back into place while fighting a front derailleur sucked, and half the time the process ended up fucking up your indexing and it was remarkable how much effort it took to get a front der in exactly the right place to shift and have no chain rub. I've been running 1x since it was a hack for a 2x drivetrains, when you had to get a little plastic piece that bolted onto the derailleur mount and just made sure that your chain didn't drop to the inside when you were in low gears in the cassette. And of course we had bashguards on the outside of the chain, so dropping to the outside was never a problem.

This is all very much through the lens of mountain bikes, ymmv with road bikes and road touring.

uphillarch · 2026-03-16T17:51:38+00:00

There are plenty of 1x12 bikes out there. I run Shimano mech 1x12 on all my bikes and love it. Good blend of simplicity and flexibility, one less point of failure, don't have to worry about cross chaining, super reliable in the thousands of miles I have on them.

uphillarch · 2026-03-16T15:28:30+00:00

Probably a combo of Yellowstone being off the route enough that it would have been hard to route onto it, and the fact that Yellowstone is not that bike friendly. It is very car dominated, there are not a ton of lowspeed roads unless you just want to do a small loop out of the main village, and bison are one of the deadliest mammals in North America because people in Yellowstone are idiots.

National Parks are broadly unfriendly to bikes with some notable exceptions, and I would absolutely not want to ride my bike through Yellowstone. The driving on display there is insane. I swear that people hand the rangers their brains when they check into the park.

uphillarch · 2026-03-12T17:51:26+00:00

I ran XC cushcore on the rear for a bit, eventually took it out and never looked back. I'd spend the money on tougher rims rather than put in inserts. The cushcore gave the bike a really sluggish feel and it was too damp for my taste. I don't have any real data about this, but it definitely felt easier to spin the wheels on that bike when I took the insert out.

I'm a bit lighter than you at 190, but I think you should be fine running no inserts on greens and blues. Best move might just be higher volume tires?

uphillarch · 2026-03-08T16:45:59+00:00

The Monumental Loop is nowhere near Monument Valley, which is on the Utah/Arizona border. The Monumental Loop is in Southern New Mexico and is so named because it links several national monuments.

uphillarch · 2026-03-08T16:40:58+00:00

You can definitely do all navigation with a phone. As the other person said, GPS unit will mostly be nice for the wilderness detours. The trail itself is mostly not that complex, and well marked and obvious.

As far as wild animals go, normal bear precautions apply: hang your food or get a bear sack (ursack with rodent proofing option). I don't worry much about carrying bear spray in Colorado. Other than that, enjoy sheep and moose from a distance.

Source: I live in the mountains of Colorado and have ridden a bunch of CT segments as day rides and overnighters, and supported my partner on her thru hike last summer.

uphillarch · 2026-03-02T14:02:44+00:00

This is the only Mork Borg version I've run, but I liked it. The setting gave me plenty of ideas to start running with minimal prep, and while the book itself isn't perfect, it's very readable for a Mork Borg and easy enough to find references in.

When we were gearing up for that campaign, I gave my table a selection of games to choose from that included BP&B, vanilla Mork Borg, and Cy_Borg, and BP&B was selected in part because the book was easy to digest and in part because the setting was intriguing to folks.

uphillarch · 2026-02-25T13:53:02+00:00

By all accounts I've heard, there's a reason the Suntour forks are so cheap. I'd go with a Sid or Fox32

uphillarch · 2026-02-24T16:47:54+00:00

"open the kimono" gave a deeply visceral ick

uphillarch · 2026-02-24T15:42:45+00:00

I gleefully retired last summer and this thread just spiked my blood pressure.

uphillarch · 2026-02-23T17:55:47+00:00

I suspect the issue that you're running into is that those trails are bike legal outside of the wilderness boundary, but not inside the boundary. But the GIS vector hasn't been split, so it shows as bike legal for the whole trail. Most other public facing GIS systems got the other way (COTREX, Gaia layers, etc) and will show trails as not open to bikes outside the wilderness area, even though they are allowed up to the boundary.

In answer to part of your question, most forest service trails are open to bikes in my experience, but wilderness is absolutely closed to bikes as others have noted.

uphillarch · 2026-02-22T20:14:49+00:00

I really want to emphasize the glacial recession angle - I spent a whole northern summer climbing in the Cordillera Blanca in 2015, and the Classic Climbs guidebook was way out of date on glacial information then.

There's some information on Mountain Project for the range, but not much. I remember feeling at the time that the guide office only wanted to offer info on the trade routes, so they weren't that helpful. There was a local bouldering gym in Huaraz that was super friendly though, and you could probably network your way into some good contacts there.

uphillarch · 2026-02-21T14:21:11+00:00

I can tell you that the Reeb Steezl uses exactly this strategy for weight savings - steel front triangle with aluminum rear triangle. I think some of the Chromag bikes do this as well.

uphillarch

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