Trading Up For A Santa Cruz Blur...

As any regular readers of our blog will know by now, we're based in an area of Southern Oregon with some outstanding riding on all fronts; road, MTB, gravel. So our personal rides tend to reflect this, and our enthusiasm for the made-in-USA brands that we specialize in here at AVT.

And so it was against this backdrop that I set out on the search for a new mountain bike.. the perfect machine for regular rides in my backyard of the Ashland Watershed.

My starting point was my 2016 Ibis Ripley, a damn fine bike for our local terrain. It was time to retire my Ibis, as it was getting a little heavy for some of the long climbs we have locally. I rarely take a shuttle (unlike a lot of mountain bikers around here) and prefer to get a good hard workout in riding up before hitting the many technical & fast downhill trails. But I'm no XC racer and didn't want a traditional XC style full suspension bike.

Thankfully in recent years we've seen the emergence of a new breed of slacker more aggressive XC bikes. I'm guessing these are fueled by the development of lighter more durable components which allow riders to maintain a more trail orientated riding style. Combined with shedding weight from key components like frame, fork & wheels. My choices came down to the Intense Sniper and Santa Cruz Blur... the new Canyon Lux was an outsider, but it's just a little too Euro XC racer for my liking.

Singletrack Magazine had put the SC Blur through it's paces recently and experimented with a slightly bigger 120mm fork, so largely based on the strength of this review, and seeing our local trail pro Nathan Riddle shredding Enduro races on a Blur my mind was made up. 

The Final Build.

Using a mix of parts from my Ibis, plus a new Fox Stepcast 34/120 fork, some White Industries goodies and a carbon dropper from KS, the Blur was ready to roll... almost! Switching over from the standard out-of-the-box XC set up with remote lock out front and rear turned out to me a little more complex than expected. But thanks to a last minute / fast turnaround service from Dirtlabs, I was able to have the rear shock modified to remove the remote lockout and replace it with a standard 3pos adjust lever.