The Radavist

Announced today, the Revel Bikes Tirade is a 29er, 140-millimeter travel titanium hardtail, unlike anything the brand has offered in the past. With generous tire clearance, beautiful cable routing, and more, it’s clear Revel has used merged its own design prowess, learned through making phenomenal full-suspension bikes, and the re-labeling of its titanium brand, Why Cycles, to force an evolution of the almighty hardtail. Read on for John’s nerdy science talk intertwined with commentary on how hardtails are still having a moment in 2024 below!

On a recent Radavist Retreat, John and Hailey left their wintery homes to ride the various trails and gravelly terrain down in Phoenix with Josh. While there, John rode the Knolly Tyaughton Steel he’d procured from the brand earlier this winter and spent time riding amongst the Stone Eaters of South Mountain Park. Find out what he thought about this wild hardtail 29er with an even wilder price point ($2,449 complete) below!

While our favorite stories are always ride and event coverage, people love flocking to The Radavist for our opinion on products. We view ourselves as the bike industry’s press corps, offering nuanced takes on hot items each year, while pushing back ever so slightly on the long arm of the industry’s marketing. This year, we cracked a lot of hard nuts but walked away with some compelling products—some of which deserve extra recognition—all while deciphering the world of bikes we know and love, and penning opinion pieces that garnered lots of eyes throughout the past twelve months.

Let’s check out The Radavist Product Awards and our Top 10 Articles of 2023 below!

While Curtis Inglis from Retrotec Cycles was in Santa Fe, John took along a camera for some of their rides and documented Curtis’ new twin top tube Funduro. This 140mm-travel hardtail 29er is one that Curtis built for himself to display at the 2023 MADE bike show and was the perfect choice for sampling Santa Fe’s side country riding.

Curtis and his bike undertook one of the more technical rides in the Southern Rockies, and John was there to document it all. Check out a stunning gallery of the bike and the singletrack that makes Santa Fe such a great MTB destination below!

No matter how innovative or controversial a given mountain bike technology may be, it’s usually just a means to an end. A way to add efficiency or capability. Sure, these technologies can often make for utterly spectacular rides. But bikes themselves—especially full-suspension bikes—rarely add any soul purely for soul’s sake.

That may be why we love to highlight bikes like the REEB SST, Chromag Darco, and, of course, the Starling Murmur. These bikes have esoteric quirks usually found only on hardtail, gravel, and town bikes. And they just happen to also offer utterly spectacular rides.

But when Travis Engel noticed function-first stalwarts, Pivot and Specialized suddenly teasing in-house experiments in lugged carbon fiber, he wondered if there might be a new search for soul afoot…

Back in late 2018, I took delivery of a quirky steel full-suspension bike to review from a small framebuilding operation in the UK called Starling Cycles. Over the course of a few months, I rode the shit out of it in Los Angeles, where I was living at the time, and couldn’t get enough of it. As someone who lives metal bikes and loves riding trails, I hadn’t fully migrated to a full suspension chassis because I didn’t like the way the widely-available carbon models rode. The Murmur changed that for me. I reviewed the Murmur in April 2019 and immediately bought a V2 Murmur. 

Now living in Santa Fe, with arguably more technical terrain, I haven’t been able to put down the Starling Cycles Murmur; taking it high into the Sangre Mountains and beyond, this steel full-suspension bike really changed my perspective on the potential ride quality of full-suspension mountain bikes. Late last year, Joe from Starling reached out, saying he had a V3 frame for me to test out, and once again, I’ve been reaching for it nonstop.

Let’s look at my thoughts on the small changes the V3 underwent, leading to large improvements, and a broader perspective on steel full-suspension bikes below…

Founded in the college town of Tempe, AZ, State Bicycle Company started out selling affordable fixed-gear bikes and geared townies for college students and commuters. In their ten years of mostly direct-to-consumer bike business since, State has grown exponentially and now occupies a large warehouse/office in downtown Phoenix where they store and ship hundreds of bikes each month. While the brand still focuses on affordability and accessibility, its product offerings have expanded to include: lightweight road bikes, steel gravel bikes, coaster brake cruisers, electric bikes, apparel, and accessories. One bike in their lineup caught my attention a while back, the 4130 All-Road. Positioned as a versatile and well-equipped steel adventure bike, the 4130 fits 700c or 650b wheels with ample tire clearance, accepts drop or flat bars, boasts plenty of accessory mounts, and is designed around a comfortable geometry—for only $899!

In early 2022, State launched the 4130 All-Road with a SRAM Rival XPLR eTap AXS build kit for $1,999 and, if you were a prospective customer watching State’s website, you’d have noticed they sold out fast and have seen limited restocks. During that fleeting window of availability, I got my hands on one for this review and, over the past six months, have been logging long gravel rides, some singletrack shreds, and daily commutes. Continue reading for my thoughts on this capable machine…

Remember when gravity-focused short-travel 29ers were edgy? When a brand would give one to their most decorated downhiller, and it would break YouTube? Now, this subcategory has become a staple. Every brand has one. But not Canyon. They have three. And the black sheep among them is the Spectral 125. Find out why Travis Engel still doesn’t want to send his test bike back in this detailed review below…

Hello dear readers. Are you ready?

Buckle your seatbelts, put on your out-of-office. Be sure to prepare a too-carefully-constructed pour-over coffee, or maybe a glass of tap water, and settle in. We are about to embark on a journey together, an unbiased, at times fanciful, long-term review of the GMX+ adventure bike from Curve Cycling.

While I pull together our Ruta Del Jefe coverage for tomorrow’s post, I wanted to share with you a bike that has eluded me over the years. I’ve long admired Jordan’s Sklar Bikes 29er tourer but never got a chance to document it because before I could, it got stolen! Jordan got it replaced by an identical bike and in some form of celestial serendipity, my path crossed with Jordan this weekend and I got to relish the experience of photographing this lovely machine!

The Ibis Ripley AF is an aluminum version of the very popular Ripley (carbon) model, with the exception of a slightly slacker head tube. It seems that the Ripley has been a pretty damn popular model for Ibis, so why not adjust for yearly geometry inflation (moar slacker!) and make it more affordable at the same time? Seems like a winning concoction to me.

For those of you here for a quick review: the Ripley AF is really fun and a great deal. Its few drawbacks are minuscule enough to be overlooked. Go have your second cup of coffee and see what part of society is falling apart today. Then, if you’re still here for the long haul, let’s dip our toes into the ever-fleeting world of this “down-country, enduro-lite, extreme gravel, or whatever the industry’s buzzword is this week” bike.

Rigid bikes. The roots of riding off-road, yet now the arena of weirdos, quacks, and masochists. Mountain biking started out long before telescoping forks and complex linkage designs, but the bikes of those early days are now a far cry from the activity most consider “mountain biking”.

Of course, those weirdos, quacks, and masochists still have a place in this world, and it turns out I’m one of them. It wasn’t always this way. I used to ride and write about my experience with suspension mountain bikes as a full time job. I could go on all day about spring curves and axle paths, dampers and volume spacers, sag and suspension setup.

But, in the past five or so years, my focus has shifted. I’d rather spend a weekend riding to small places and sleeping out under the stars than shuttling the local loamers and crushing parking lot beers. And in that time I’ve come to value a mountain bike that requires less maintenance.

Having ridden a lot of high end suspension bikes, I know what it takes to keep them running tip top – and I just don’t have the facilities to do that at home, nor the money to pay someone else to do it. A rigid bike makes sense for my sometimes bi-weekly, sometimes monthly mountain bike hobby.