A Pair Of Tires With Bite

When I first set up my Stooge MK5 in March of last year, I mounted a pair of Schwalbe Nobby Nic 27.5x3.0” tires. For 3” wide tires, they were light, coming in under 900 grams. They climbed and cornered well but had one shortfall. As a rear tire, the Nobby Nic performed poorly when braking in steep terrain. The tire broke loose too quickly. I rode into stuff a few times where I had to get off the bike to get down that segment of trail safely. I would have easily ridden it with a better tire. For my second season on the Stooge, I’ve opted to equip it with a more aggressive pair of tires.

Up front, I mounted the largest tire the steel fork can swallow, a Duro Crux at a whopping size of 3.25”. I popped on a 3.0” wide WTB Bridger in the back. In 2021, I bought four of these from Chain Reaction Cycles for $14.00 a piece. Both these tires weigh considerably more than the Nobby Nic. The WTB Bridger is a few millimeters narrower, but interestingly, it is a good centimeter taller than the German Schwalbe. Visually, it is easy to see that the bike now rolls on a lot more rubber than last year.

Because the bike industry abandoned 27.5+ tires in 2016, I stocked a bunch of tires for my Stooge. For the next few years, I have:

• 2 Duro Crux 27.5x3.25” (1 mounted)
• 4 WTB Bridger 27.5x3.0” (1 mounted)
• 2 Kenda Havoc Pro 27.5x3.0”
• 2 Specialized Ground Control GRID 2Bliss Ready 6Fattie 27.5x3.0”
• 1 WTB Trail Boss 27.5x3.0" (from a recent NOS purchase on eBay)