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I recently took a dirt bike ride with some buddies from Lake Pleasant, AZ to Crown King.  The summer has ended and we have been blessed with a cooled off fall season.  The hook behind crown king is that you start at 1500 ft or so in the desert and ride up to a restaurant  at the top of the mountain at 5900ft.  It was actually a little chilly up there.

Its about a 60-mile round trip of which ascending up a rock and granite filled two-tracker.  Its difficult/technical going up and takes about an hour and a half or more.  Coming down is much faster (about 50 minutes) as you simply use the momentum to plow over obstacles. 

Almost at the end of the ride, I felt a handling problem.  The bike felt ’squirrely’ as if my front tire was flat.  I stopped and checked it out an all was well, so I carried on. When we got to the truck, I discovered that my 95-ply Cheng Shin rear tire was flat. 

I have been using this particular tire choice since coming to the desert as its the only one that can seem to handle the rocky, and otherwise hard surfaces that I frequent.  Oh yeah, and they are about $70 per set delivered.  But it has one major drawback.  I hate mounting them with tire irons.

The rear tire is so damn thick that I have bent tire irons trying to get the last section of tire over the rim.  It didn’t even come off the bead.  It was exactly that point where I gave up.  The funny thing is that the tire was only half compressed as the sidewall strength kept the tire with a ‘half-full’ appearnce.  I have sworn at this same sidewall strength with tire irons in hand…

With an already slow leak in the front tube, and a total loss of the rear tube, It was time to do some service.  Not wanting to lose my cool, I broke out the check book and went to my local Cycle Gear and had a guy with a machine do it.  That was odd - I didn’t swear at all during ‘his’ tire mounting process.

Yeah, I could have saved  couple bucks, but how much are blood, sweat, and tears worth.  For me, it was $25 per tire including a new tube.  Even though I am a cheap ass by nature, I can live with that.