My bike’s in the shop getting dolled up for the Downieville trip. Since I still wanted to ride this morning (and couldn’t let Alex get another flake out of me), I rode our extra bike this morning. The bike is a 17" Schwinn Moab hardtail, which is an inch or two small for me. It’s got an old Judy on it, with maybe 2.5" of front suspension. That’s not out-of-line with the pretty smooth trails at Waterdog, but it’s quite different from the 5" full suspension trail bike I’m used to.
All-in-all, I still had a good ride. The biggest pain in riding this bike wasn’t that it’s too small, but that it doesn’t have clipless pedals. I usually have clipless pedals, so I’m used to a very strong connection to the bike. With no retention whatsoever, it bucked me off the pedals almost anytime I hit resistance, which oddly enough happened more on climbs than descents. I got better at handling that toward the end of the ride, but I think I’ll try to find the pedals from my old bike to put on this one (of course keeping the flat ones for when we loan the bike to newbies who don’t ride clipless pedals yet).