Casual gravel riders?

[WVU fan]

Just got a Poseidon Redwood ($499 close out) dropbar and testing out the gravel bike waters with a great introductory bike that will do the job. Signed up for de Buque in May. More to push myself and get in better shape. Realize I do love pedaling in the dirt as well as off roading in a vehicle. Anyone else doing the ride or in the gravel dropbar game?

 

[DaveInDenver]

I don't have a dedicated gravel bike but the Gunnar Rock Hound 29er I do have is completely adequate for the Wild Horse, which is borderline cross country MTB in some sections. It's all county roads but they aren't always super well maintained county roads. You'll love it and that bike looks just great for it. People will ride it on cyclocross but that's a bit light IMO for this course. OTOH you'd hate anything heavier or more slack on the 99.7% of the course.

Some day I'll get around to putting drop bars on the Gunnar and just make it a monster cross bike. What's held me up is finding the right shifters. I have Shimano calipers that I'd like to keep and the 1x drivetrain. So I'd like a non-shifting left brake hood with hydaulic master cylinders ideally in 10 speeds. Kind of a unicorn.

I love the bike but it's a small tube, thin wall 70/73 geometry and I knew after a year wholly unsuited for riding as an actual MTB in Colorado. So it's only used for mixed tours where there's a lot of flat or pavement. IOW, essentially a heavy duty gravel bike. I love the bike and the paint job. Just part of a stable of bikes from now defunct brands...

 

[Corbet]

I’ve got an old Cannondale XS800 but haven’t ridden it in years. Maybe decades. Was my commuter long ago that I also would ride nearly any MTB trail on. Custom build with 10sp Campagnolo Daytona. Headshok has 25mm of travel.

I don’t take my cycling near as seriously anymore and just ride over everything on my enduro at a casual pace.

 

[Cruisertrash]

@DaveInDenver Man, I wanted a Gunnar for a long time. Nice stuff! Also, bar-end shifters are always the answer 😉

Does my old junk count?

Yeah, all of my stuff is old and antiquated, but you air those tires down to about 20psi and you can ride gravel all day. It does some bumpier stuff too, and can do so fully loaded.

Unfortunately that event is too soon for me to work into my schedule, but I would love to do some similar rides like that or even non-event DIY weekend rides or light bikepacking. I feel myself getting further and further out of shape lately and really think a bike will be part of getting healthier. So if anyone has other events or rides going on…. or wants to do a 1-2 night overnight on Buckhorn Road….

 

[Cruisertrash]

Edit: I had a realization…

In reality I’d get laughed out of an event on my Trek by the spandex gang. It’s not a “proper” gravel bike that fits what the bike companies sell as a “gravel bike”. Even though the frame was designed for dirt riding and I built it with refurbed quality components specifically to be in the saddle on dirt all day. 🤷‍♂️

 

[DaveInDenver]

Edit: I had a realization…

In reality I’d get laughed out of an event on my Trek by the spandex gang. It’s not a “proper” gravel bike that fits what the bike companies sell as a “gravel bike”. Even though the frame was designed for dirt riding and I built it with refurbed quality components specifically to be in the saddle on dirt all day. 🤷‍♂️

Maybe. But who cares? Is that a 1985 830? Anyway, it would not be my first choice on the Wild Horse but that's more due to the fenders and bars. You'd want something wide & flat or drop with good flats for technical. Fenders would just irritate with jammed rocks and muddy clay if it rains.

Gravel spans a lot of things and this case back in the 1990s we'd probably call it a XC MTB course. It kind of reminds me of the old race at the USAFA, although certainly less singletrack and technical. The profile and location are a little bit similar.

BTW, bar end shifters solve one problem but I'm still left with finding hydraulic brake hoods. Shimano makes them in the 'cross and Ultrega and up groupos so $$$$. I'd likely convert to mechanical disc brakes if I ever get off the dime to fit drop bars. Truth is MTB bars and bar ends work just fine so it's not high on the urgency.

 

[Cruisertrash]

@DaveInDenver It's a 1984 830, you were dang close. I definitely have other fenders I swap to when NOT in townie mode, and I've definitely ridden this thing like an MTB

And you can pry my mustache bars from my cold dead hands.

 

[rover67]

Hey Dave,

I do 1x on my gravel bike with stock shimano components.

It has a GRX left brake lever that works my dropper (not a shifter) and on the rear the newish GRX rear 12spd. Derrailure (rd RX-822) and a 11spd MTB cassette. works great. all factory shimano. Limit screws adjusted to keep the 12spd grx derrailure happy with the 11spd 11-50 cassette. You could do something like that on your bike with a cheaper cassette (m8000 is 60 bucks) but the brake/shifters arent super cheap. The new GRX Long Cage derrailure is surprisingly affordable though at $126. Anyhow I found used levers on ebay and bought a new derrailure to do mine.

To answer the original post though I have and I ride the gravel bike some but not a lot. I prefer my MTB mostly. It's usually when the other folks are riding gravel/road bikes that I get it out. A race would be fun though, thats awesome youre doing that!!

 

[DaveInDenver]

@DaveInDenver It's a 1984 830, you were dang close. I definitely have other fenders I swap to when NOT in townie mode, and I've definitely ridden this thing like an MTB

And you can pry my mustache bars from my cold dead hands.

Hmmm, interesting. All the 1984 830s I've seen (which is one) were the purple-ish red, what Trek called berry with gold labels. The 1985 was blue with gold labels. In 1986 it become the 830 Antelope and was red again.

Back then Trek wasn't a big company and there's no reason they maybe serialized and sold them overlapping years like boutiques often do. If it's all original being perhaps an non-catalog (perhaps even custom) configuration might make it worth $500 and a cup of coffee instead of the regular $500 you'd get from a CL tire kicker.

In any case Trek always put them in their all terrain catalog so you're doing it totally right, totally rad! I didn't mean to imply moustachios were bad, just that sometimes running upstream against the prevailing flow is just being stubborn for stubbornality's sake. Like how some people refuse to put gears on their MTBs. What kind of special stupid do ya gotta be?

 

[DaveInDenver]

Like how some people refuse to put gears on their MTBs. What kind of special stupid do ya gotta be?

For the record that insult was self deprecation.

 

[Cruisertrash]

Who me, swimming upstream? No way! Haha! I really have fallen in love with mustache bars though and really enjoy them. These are not the original Nittos, they are actually the Oxford bar by Soma Fab - a hair wider with a more relaxed curve than the Nittos. So I guess I shouldn't call them mustache bars ... but close enough.

I am set up very much period correct with every component rebuilt. Shimano Deer Head derailleurs (Deore before Deore), Dia Compe cantis and levers, SR Sakae triple crankset (gotta have my granny gear). The Shimano bar end shifters are newer of course.

FWIW I didn't really know him, but my ex-wife was friends with a guy who did the Tour Divide in I think 16 days on a FIXED gear MTB. I can't imagine that level of suffering.

 

[Cruisertrash]

@WVU fan Sorry for the hijack. I'm interested in the occasional dirt road grind and light XC stuff, but I can't participate in that event. Maybe we can get a crew together for some casual weekend warrior stuff. Fair warning: I'm out of practice but could probably pull 10-20 miles. I'd like to work my way back up to doing Boulder -> Gold Hill -> Boulder again. That 3500' elevation gain over 15 miles is when I'll know I'm in shape again.

@DaveInDenver If only my Surly Ogre hadn’t been stolen a few years ago, it was an even better bike for this kind of stuff. Here’s a photo from a day trip out of CB on 317, up to Gothic, over some single track, and back down the west side on 811. It was a steep 30 mile morning.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Jim, if you ever get the chance you have to ask my lovely bride about the time someone showed up to do a 3 day ride of the Kokpelli on a 50 lbs touring Surly with wood fenders and everything. It took 3 people to do the portages. His name is Mario, good dude, still hear from him sometimes. Just the definition of "tour" means a lot of things.

 

[Cruisertrash]

Jim, if you ever get the chance you have to ask my lovely bride about the time someone showed up to do a 3 day ride of the Kokpelli on a 50 lbs touring Surly with wood fenders and everything. It took 3 people to do the portages. His name is Mario, good dude, still hear from him sometimes. Just the definition of "tour" means a lot of things.

FWIW I carried that damn thing up a steep switchback singletrack on that particular outing. Maybe 500' of elevation gain and about 500' as the crow flies, but probably 1/4-1/2 mile if you unwind the siwtchbacks. Took me half an hour. It's certainly not a light bike, but it can be carried. Now, out on Kokopelli weighed down with food, water, tent, etc ... anybody's going to be heavy. I really view the weight of a bike as insignificant compared to the weight of the rider and gear.

 

[DaveInDenver]

FWIW I carried that damn thing up a steep switchback singletrack on that particular outing. Maybe 500' of elevation gain and about 500' as the crow flies, but probably 1/4-1/2 mile if you unwind the siwtchbacks. Took me half an hour. It's certainly not a light bike, but it can be carried. Now, out on Kokopelli weighed down with food, water, tent, etc ... anybody's going to be heavy. I really view the weight of a bike as insignificant compared to the weight of the rider and gear.

It was a supported ride, not bikepack. Have you ridden Kokopelli?

The tour in this case was Bikerpelli, they do it 3 days so it's not a total beat down and a little bit of a party. They do about 50 miles each day and the general flow is about 8 hours of semi serious MTBing daily bookended with a good breakfast in the AM and margs and beer and a nice dinner in the PM.

It's still total elevation gained of roughly 14,000 feet over the 143 miles total...



The support people ended up renting him a proper MTB for days 2 and 3.