So new tires happened and I'm glad they did.
Now equipped with the
Grabber X3 mud-terrain tires.
As some of you know I've spent some time traveling with the
ExpeditionOverland crew the past couple of years. General Tire offered up some sets of pre-production X3's to the XO fleet for testing and feedback and I was able to get a set of 5 for the 200 Series. I've been very impressed with these tires. Certainly more noise than the K02's but less than KM2's in my not so scientific seat of the pants comparison. They are extremely durable based on my my initial trail time with them. I just completed a trip with XO (more on that soon
) that included many miles of tight timber trails. While we had guys out of foot for what felt like the entire way sawing and clearing deadfall, the tires were still getting the proverbial poke and prod from a variety of trunks and limbs. There was a point where we had a limb deflecting ~4" into the sidewall of the aired down tire and I was 100% positive the tire was going to roll out with a sidewall puncture. Nope, not even mark. General is really hyping their "Duragen" ply technology and I'm not hear to say it's better or worse than BFG's TriGard's or Goodyear's Dupont-Kevlar sidewalls but I'm pretty ecstatic how they've held up thus-far.
Prior to that trip I did a big southern Utah traverse in the 200 as a pre-run for the
Drive to the Summit trip. We were running pretty fast/hard and I ran the tires fully inflated on a variety of trail surfaces from hard pack dirt to sand and gravel. No complaints, they were compliant, held traction nicely and didn't pick up an obnoxious amount of gravel in the treads.