Rocky Mountain Pipeline - Sea Otter 2016

Rocky Mountain was one of the first major companies to come out of the gate with a plus-size bike. True, brands like Surly have been sailing these seas for years. For some reason, when Rocky debuted that bike — the Sherpa — at Sea Otter two years ago, people took notice.



The proto-Sherpa may have seemed like some kind of flipper-headed, six-toed oddity back in 2014, but Sea Otter 2016 is a whole different scene. This joint is packed today with plus-size models. Some models look well thought out. Others appear to be the result of a couple of desperate meetings between the marketing team and an engineer who was having a really bad day.

Evolution can be a mofo like that.

Given the mad rush to build bikes with extra-fat tires, we thought we’d go full circle and talk to Rocky Mountain’s resident marketing guy-slash-international male model, Andreas Hestler, about their new Pipeline. We already wrote a thorough piece on what the Pipeline is all about. You can check it out here. Think of this as more of a “Why did you actually make the Pipeline?” story.




Vernon Felton: A couple years ago, you guys were one of the only companies at Sea Otter with a plus-size bike, the Sherpa. Now almost everyone has one in their line. What sets the Pipeline apart from those other plus-size bikes and from your last plus-size bike?

Andreas Hestler: The Sherpa was dedicated to bike packing and big adventures. Our product manager looked at it like ‘When the trail ends, I want to go and see what more is out there. What bike would work best here?’ That was really the premise behind the Sherpa.

Now, three years later, everything has evolved, so we’ve evolved a bit too. We wanted to make a trail bike—the kind of plus-size bike better suited to more aggressive riders. So, we adapted our Instinct frame, used the Boost 148 axle standard and made the Pipeline.


Felton: The component market for plus-size bikes has also blown up in the past twelve months. How has that manifested itself on this bike?

Hestler: Yeah, well, now we have options on rims, tires, cranks, forks—we have a lot of options from manufacturers that just didn’t exist when we first made the Sherpa. So you see all of that here on the Pipeline—Boost fork and rear end, BB92 with a Boost crank, new more aggressive tires….




Felton: Seemingly small differences in tire sizes make a huge difference in how these plus-size bikes ride. Why’d you go with 2.8's on the Pipeline?

Hestler: We went with the Maxxis Rekon 2.8's—it just suits our riding in B.C., but you can fit up to a 3.25-inch front and rear tire. A 2.8 is what we felt matches best to a plus-size, aggressive trail bike, but if you want to take it out in the snow, or you live somewhere really dry and sandy, the bigger tire might be the better option. We wanted to give people the flexibility to upsize or downsize their tires to match their own conditions. With this frame, you’re not stuck with just one tire size.




Felton: So, you adapted the Instinct front triangle into the design of the new Pipeline. The two bikes have that common design DNA. Taking that into account, when do you personally reach for the Instinct and when do you reach for the Pipeline?

Hestler: They’re definitely different. When I reach for a two-niner like the Instinct, I reach for a race weapon—a cross-country racing machine—a scalpel of a bike. Weight considerations—particularly from the rim through to the tire are massively important. I want to go fast in the front country.

When I reach for the Pipeline, I’m going out for fun. Maybe I’m bike-packing, maybe I’m just going on a long all-day Chilcotin expedition. Bottom line, I’m looking for a bike that gives me more room for error on trails that I am riding blind and the plus-size tires on this bike let me keep riding aggressively, but with that extra margin for error in the backcountry.

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MENTIONS: @RockyMountainBicycles

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