So as you may have noticed from my bike history page, mountain bikes were front and center when it came to my interest in bikes basically from my teenage years through to my thirties, when I started to diversify a little – but MTB remains an important thing to me.
For all of my twenties, basically, I was a hardtail diehard. Then, in 2010 or 2011 I tried a buddy’s full-suspension Banshee and was immediately sold. I went through a few bikes but the Knolly was the first “dream build”, made possible by a very generous bonus at work that year. The frame I found used, and the build centered around the just-released SRAM XX1 drivetrain, which was the first 1×11 to market – kind of wild to think now, but this was a brand new concept at the time and only available as a top-end spec.
The bike was built by Matt at North Shore Bike Shop, after hours while I sat and watched drinking beer (I had brought him a 6-pack not realizing he doesn’t drink). My first ride on the bike was Ladies Only on Fromme, and the bike performed admirably – this is a pretty hectic trail to ride on an unfamiliar bike (at least at my moderate skill level) but it felt comfortable straight away.
This bike consolidated my MTB quiver to one, from previously owning a Bandit 29er and a TR250 park / shuttle bike. It survived many Whistler bike park trips, slabs of Squamish, and many north shore days both pedaling up and shuttling.
Notably it also carried me through a three-day bike-packing trip in the South Chilcotin mountain range, fittingly its namesake. I rode this with one buddy, and the fact that this is grizzly country never left our minds for a moment. We were fortunate (unfortunate?) to see a group of grizzlies hunting marmots on the final ascent to Windy Pass – which meant we didn’t spend a lot of time on the summit. Too bad too, because it was the most picturesque point of the whole trip.
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