Good bye to an old friend.

I've decommissioned my Surly Cross Check. I tore it down and it is just sitting there in pieces. I'm slowly selling them off, bit by bit. It was a tough choice but I've been thinking long and hard about what I like in a bike and there are a few things that consistently come to mind. I like disc brakes. In most situations rim brakes work just fine, but there are those handful of times where you get yourself into a situation where you just wish you had disc brakes. The other is big tires. The more I ride the less I care how much my bike weighs. I like fat tires. Mountain bikes make me happy, you can pretty much get what ever you want done on a mountain bike. Also, for a commuting / touring bike I really turned the Cross Check into a sporty little thing, which was silly. So keeping all those things in mind I plan to build up a Surly ECR. I've got most of it planned out right now but I don't need to sweat the small stuff just yet, until I sell the rest of the stuff. I will post updated as it gets built.

I suspect the ECR will be a wonderful bike. I've read some really good things about it and I am pretty excited. The geometry of the frame is a little less upright than the Ogre, which I was originally looking at, and a little less aggressive than the Krampus. It has the ability to accommodate big ass tires and rims, which I also like. For the wheel sets I am planning on using the Velocity Dually rims, which are 40 mm wide and about 300 grams less each than the rabbit hole from Surly. They can also be set up tubeless because they are a double wall rim, which the rabbit hole is not. I'm going to go ahead and get a Schmidt generator hub as well. I want this thing to be a true touring/commuting machine and I think the hub will help out with that tremendously. I'll cross the bridge about what tires I want to use when I get there.

As far as components I am thinking of just going straight Shimano SLX. It is not super expensive and it works well. That is all I really need. Beyond that I'm thinking BB7 for the brakes and the rest of the stuff will be improvised. I will use my seat post and Brooks saddle from the Cross Check on the new ECR, a little piece of the old for the new.

While I will miss my old friend, I don't regret anything. We had some good times together and I hope to find it a good home.

I don't usually get way, way off topic but I do have something non-bike related I would like to share with you. I love bears, for my own reasons they are very special to me. There is a man named Casey Anderson who runs a bear sanctuary in Montana for bears found in the wild who are injured or lost. He spends a lot of his own money keeping this place running but it mostly operates off of donations. Recently one of the bears, a 3 year old named Lucy, has fallen ill. They have gotten her checked out and there is nothing wrong after a full physical and blood test. They are trying to get a scan done to see if there is anything else they can find, though this procedure is not cheap. They are asking for donations to help save this beautiful young lady. You can check out the donation page here. Please take a look and if you have $5 to spare, toss it in the bucket. Thanks for reading!

Lucy the bear.