Just like 36ers, 32” wheels have been around for well over a decade using unicycle rims and tires – but the tires had no tread and were heavy, non-tubeless wire-bead casings – not a tire that could be fairly compared to a 29er’s performance on any riding surface. Even for 36ers, the knobby Vee T-Monster was a wire bead not tubeless-ready heavy casing tire. Travis Brown has been one of the people testing new wheel and tire sizes behind the scenes for years. Good tires are usually the limiting factor when a new wheel size arises because of the large initial investment and likely a lack of bikes that fit the tire. Looking back 25+ years when WTB released the Nanoraptor 29×2.1″ tire, not many people were asking for a new wheel size but they knew something we didn’t and pushed for it anyways. Because there were very few frames that would fit this “plus-sized 700c tire,” people experimented with putting a 29″ wheel and a rigid fork on front of their 26er frame and seeing how it rode. We have been seeing the same thing happen with the 32×2.4″ Maxxis Aspen tire, the most notable being at the 2026 Sea Otter where the Downhill race was won on such a bike, but a few custom bikes pre-dated that bike by several months.

Small framebuilders are always quick to adapt and make dedicated frames for new wheel sizes, and in that way may spur bigger companies to take notice of the potential market. It took the promise of a potential market and work behind the scenes from big companies (i.e., Trek/Fisher) when 29” wheels came onto the scene and it is no different today.  The amount of money to make a new tire is well above any potential future return on investment from the entirety of the world’s small framebuilders. While it seems like Maxxis created this tire out of the blue, the reality is that they were asked by Scott Sports so they could test for its potential benefits in racing. Once such a tire was in hand they were able to show that 32’s showed promise for XC and gravel racing and we are seeing history in motion (as now witnessed by their prototype gravel bikes at Unbound). Seeing Schwalbe, Teravail, and Vittoria follow Maxxis’ lead at this year’s Sea Otter indicates that there’s a lot more to come and small framebuilders are capitalizing on their ability to quickly pivot and tire availability before the big guns get their inventory settled and take over.

Before i get to the interview with Travis, here’s some background with my own experience in this time period.

Back to the dawn of 29ers…

In 1999, when the 29×2.1” WTB Nanoraptor came out, everyone was riding 26ers of very similar geometry. Fischer released a couple 29er bikes in 2002, the same year as the Surly Karate Monkey, and in 2004 I got one myself.

It’s hard to believe now but 29ers did not immediately take off, a lot of people were against this “wagon wheel” and felt it had no place in serious mountain biking. As a result it took almost 10 years for widespread acceptance and adoption. Once we could buy the 29” Nanoraptor and Salsa released the Delgado rim, a few friends and I put rigid forks on our 26ers and tried them out with a 29er front wheel. Doing so did a couple of things that changed how we looked at our old mountain bikes. First, the bigger front wheel slackened the head tube angle of their 26” bikes from around 71 deg to 69 deg. This allowed riders to feel what slacker head angles did for riding, in addition to the greater rollover and cornering traction of the larger diameter tire. As an example of why 29er’s didn’t immediately take off, here’s a review from 2007 of a 69er, commenting on their opinion of the 29″ wheel size:

“My intrigue with the 69er concept stems from my mild indifference towards 29ers. It’s not that I don’t think they have a place. 29ers are certainly good on the right terrain and especially on longer rides where a steady pace is what you want. I just have never liked the sluggish steamroller feel on tight technical terrain. To me, they feel heavy, slow and sort of just blah on the trail; fast over the long haul but slow to get up to speed. I will say that 29ers roll over obstacles well. It’s sort of a matter of physics, not debatable.” (Mtn Flyer review, 2010)

The first bike I converted to a 69er was my Spot singlespeed with a Wily (built by Blacksheep) steel unicrown fork. I remember loving this bike’s increased cornering capabilities, even with a rigid fork, and the added rollover was noticeable. You could run lower pressure in the tire adding even more traction. The unique aspect of the 69er setup was that the rear center was still short and had the quick acceleration of the 26er rear wheel. The BB drop was low and the front being raised up a bit further assisted wheeling & manualing making it a really fun bike to ride on trail. Not only did the 69er introduce us to 29 inch wheels but it also introduced XC riders to what a slacker head angle felt like. To put this in perspective, XC bikes were still using 71/73 degree head/seat tube angles. To keep the same Trail figure the first 29ers from custom builders as well as from Fischer and Surly had 72° head tube angles.

Around 2003, I ordered a segmented Russian “Sibex” Ti disc fork that I used on a loaner Trek 9800 frame. In 2004, some friends and I rode the bike-legal sections of the Colorado Trail – trading off who drove when they were needing a day off the bike. A few of the photos taken by TimmyP were used in the 5th Edition of the guide book!

From 2002 until 2006 there was increasing acceptance of 29ers but it hadn’t taken off yet. In 2006, a production 69er singlespeed with a Maverick double-crown fork was released by Trek and a year later a geared version with a 100mm Fox Float fork came out. I bought the geared 69er to use as my everyday XC bike since I already had a singlespeed, but now wish I had bought the rootbeer brown Singlespeed, that bike had a presence.

Around this same time, Carver Bikes released their 96er, touting the same ride qualities and performance characteristics as the Trek 69ers but the Carver had a bit different geometry including a degree steeper 70 deg head tube angle. The Trek 69er was the first cross country bike to be released with such a slack head tube angle. I don’t know what year but Ti Cycles also made a Ti 69er and here’s what they had to say about them.

Looking back, the 69er was exactly what it seemed like – a transitional bike – keeping aspects of the 26er we enjoyed while adding parts of the 29er that made it ride in a very new and different way. With more experimentation and money being put into 29” wheels, brands soon 29ers competitively light with wheels as strong as 26ers; plus expanded engineering of suspension designs allowed longer travel 29ers and the changes to geometry capitalized on what makes them unique and fun to ride. As a result the full 29er caught on and more or less killed the 26er. (27.5 mullets would have filled that gap but the absence of that wheel size would come back at a later date…as we still see today.)

Interview with Travis Brown

The brainchild of the 69er at Trek was Travis Brown, an icon in the mountain biking world and inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2006. Travis raced professionally for Trek Mountain Bikes for around 15 years, and Manitou (Doug Bradbury) for a few years before that. Starting off with a 10th at the first UCI World Championships in 1990 in his hometown of Durango, CO he stomped onto the scene winning his first NORBA XC race in 1996 and crowned NORBA National Champion in 1999. A year later he raced at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia being the first person to race a full-suspension mountain bike at the Olympics. All along he’s been a tireless Trail builder and trail advocate working with IMBA and Durango Trails. He’s been Product Developer and Field Test Manager with Trek for over 20 years, a role where he’s helped develop numerous products, but one of the first was the 69er so I reached out to ask a few questions on that bike’s origin story.

How did the 69er come to life? 

For me and for Trek the 69er came to life in a time when 29″ bikes still had challenges for broad market acceptance.  We had all our eggs in Fisher as our 29 brand.  We were compelled by the 29 performance but had many dealers that had both Fisher and Trek on the floor and in the still niche 29 segment we decided that we would be cannibalizing between brands in many cases with 29 Fisher and 29 Trek.  One of the more compelling characteristics of 29″ wheeled bikes was additional cornering traction so we began experimenting with just a front 29″ wheel and a rear 26″ wheel.  We found a unique handling package in the mixed platform and justified the launch of the 69er line of bikes beginning with a single speed and expanding to a geared hardtail and Top Fuel. 

What year did you start working on the design of the production models?

I think you and I both started experimenting around the same time by putting a rigid fork on a 26 hardtail that would preserve geometry and fit a 29″ wheel.  I think this was in 2002 or 2003, I know at least I had race bikes from those years that we rode with the 29″ front wheel.   I believe we released the production single speed in 2006 and the geared bikes in 2007 and 2008.  Around that time the globe finally embraced 29″ wheel cross-country bikes.  That transition really languished for about 10 years before the tipping point.  It was long enough that Trek didn’t feel like they could sustain the Fisher brand as a stand-alone brand and it got rolled into Trek as the Gary Fisher collection.  I wonder if the acceptance had happened one year earlier if the Fisher brand would still be alive.  The other subsequent fallout was the end of the 69er platform in order to concentrate resources on the growing 29 market.  The growing pains of 29 was a deterrent to continuing to pursue pioneering an additional wheel platform.  It did eventually re-emerge as the MX 27.5/29 platform

What were the two models a what year were they released?

The Single speed was a 2006 release, and I think the geared hardtail and Top Fuel were a 07/08 bike.

What was the appeal of it instead of converting to full 29 which was available at the time through Fisher?

Some of the 29 character without the direct competition with Fisher 29ers 

What staff at Trek, other companies, framebuilders, and people influenced the design and process?

There were several people experimenting with the 69 concept but the other production manufacturer campaigning hard for it was Carver Bikes and their whole line was based on it so the 29 tipping point was not good for them. 

What influenced the geometry and how did you arrive at the final numbers?

We did a lot of field testing on top of a little bit of steering geometry theory. We had realized that the Gen 1 29 geo that tried to standardize the trail figure with a steeper head tube angle (HTA) was not working so we kept going slacker and the bike kept getting better.  I think we jumped the shark with front center and HTA but now that is a different discussion.  Convincing product managers to get into the 60’s was a big lift until we rode prototypes. The 69 degree HTA at the time was considered extremely slack for the period and well…it was a convenient synergy with the bike name and wheels.

Now bikes like the 69er are called Mullets, tend to use 27.5 rear wheels, and have found widespread use in DH and Enduro riding. Why do we not see this in XC much?

The MX platform has some unique cornering characteristics and a smaller rear wheel maximizes ‘body travel’ on steeps or jumping, especially sucking up a jump lip to stay low and fast like in DH racing.  In XC where getting from A to B as fast as possible with the least amount of energy, larger wheels front and rear are really good.  To me the better small wheel is 26 (not 27.5).

How have your preferences on wheel sizes changed since 2008?

With wheels being such a fundamental part of a bikes handling and performance characteristics changes in wheels and tires – whether in width or diameter – is always a compelling experiment because of the significant change it makes to a bike.  The 29plus segment was very fun and there are still die-hard fans of that platform.  29plus had unfortunate timing with the “27.5 is the best of both worlds” marketing campaign which put a lot of plus category focus on 27.5plus.  Unfortunately, that turned out to not be superior in performance with 27.5plus but it also killed 29plus development.  We saw this phenomenon re-play with 27.5 gravel and 27.5 xc.

Any stories about the 69er and that time your career that stick out and you’d like to share?

It was just a really fun period to experiment and continue to build and understanding about how mountain bikes work and how wheel size plays into that package.  There are no bad wheel sizes as long as they are round… there are just a lot of complex benefits and liabilities to understand for a given application.