Consisting of the Elevate 22, Daybreak 17, Summit 30, and Stuff Pack 30, features range from complete simplicity to those needed to accomplish creative, technical missions. I find intact collarbones to be both beneficial and desirable in my line of work and as a self-employed person, so I was overly cautious to start with, riding an alien-feeling bike on things that I can’t ride. It’s a good-looking bike with hyper mountain bike a concise and consistent design language used throughout the frame, with all the castings for the pivot points matching the dropouts and gusset shapes. It looks pretty minimal for a long travel mountain bike. Bike Yoke is a brand with which I was not previously familiar, as they are best known for their droppers, mountain bike specific saddles with integrated suspension, and alternative yokes for rear shocks.
There were perhaps three weeks after I’d brought the bike home, it sitting in my living room, where I just looked at it a lot, half in disbelief that I owned a real mountain bike and half worrying about not riding it properly enough. After three weeks, I took it out for the first time on a familiar route to try to ride it up and down some sets of stairs or to drop off street furniture to get a feel for it before taking it out on trails. Chris took one of ten tubesets that didn’t work out as an opportunity to redesign the swing arm to accommodate a simplified single-pivot suspension design with just enough room for a 29×2.5″ tire and some mud clearance.
Our lightest and lowest volume internally framed pack, the Waypoint is designed for on-trail or off-trail backpacking for a range of users and trips. At 35L and with integrated shoulder strap pockets, this pack is suitable for long trails for the more experienced ultralight hiker, short overnights for those still working toward lower volume kits, and technical pursuits when 40L is just too much. With the pivot point inline with the chain I didn’t NEED hyper bicycles the lockout at the rear, while it might have saved a watt or two up hills the difference was negligible and probably balanced against the increased off-road climbing performance with the shock active. Through riding it every which way on everything, a bike that I initially found intimidatingly over-specced for my riding became a simple, easy to maintain, solid and enjoyable platform that has proved an invaluable addition to the bikes I already owned.
As for the dropper, I fiddled with it a few times at the start but otherwise just got it out of the way so I could ride. The dropper is designed for super quick and easy bleeding, which refreshingly takes significantly less time to do in reality than it takes to watch the 18-second video on their website about it. It’s nothing about the effects of tires, suspension, and steering geometry, hyper bicycles but the stiff bars worked nicely in the context of this bike. The BEAST rims also felt incredibly stiff both vertically and laterally, but again complemented the dynamic handling characteristics of a big squishy bike quite well. They were very light and felt incredibly solid, sustaining zero permanent damage from being repeatedly smashed against rocks when the tires bottomed out.
SRD (Sour Racing Development) also stands for Stadtreinigung Dresden, Sour’s local refuse collection and recycling company. The twist feels doubly fun as my SRD is made from tubes that were actually repurposed. Given my non-mountain biking background, there may have been some mixup before I took the bike about what a trail bike is for.