Last year upon relocating to the Bay Area, I consolidated my all mountain and down hill bikes, selling them both off. In their place I built up a Santa Cruz Nomad, going with the popular “one” bike approach familiar with those trying to get the monkey known as “Visa” off their back. With a second DH specific wheelset I reasoned, I had my bases covered, and for the occasional DH riding the Nomad with coil suspension worked well.

There was a drawback to my plan though. I don’t live in the northwest, or Vancouver, BC.

The Bay Area is a bit lacking when it comes to technical trails littered with features- especially jumps. When you have a bike that is forced to do it all, you end up with a bike that does a lot of things pretty dang well, but I’ve found that the Nomad is either too heavy, or too light for what I’m riding around here. Or specifically, who I’m riding with. The Nomad is a ride that wants to attack trails full of technical awesome, and is always going to be my number one choice for traveling to ride new spots to seek out that sort of awesome. That is, unless I’m riding dedicated gravity parks- just because it covers most of the bases. However, I have been really wanting a light version of the Nomad, or that is to say, a dedicated XC bike with Nomad handling, which Santa Cruz recently created in the form of the Blur TRc. For the typical trails here, that’s the bike to have. Light enough to keep up with team spandex and challenge their Strava times, but with all mountain handling so I can focus on crushing the downhills as well. [more after the jump…]

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