High-value all-rounder sorta CX tires

Since my high-zooters finally blew up, I've been riding the WTB Interwolf 700-38 tires on my CX/Trails/commuter bike.

My buddy Alex gave me these tires a couple years ago. As I am wont to do, I favored the fancies and disregarded these lowly workhorses. Although, thinking on it, I did use these on a couple-day CDA forest exploration with no complaints. But other than that, these tires sat in the corner of the garage for over a year.

I really like them. For our non-muddy, slightly sandy, sometimes rooty and sharp-rocky trails, these tires really put out. I've had a handful of flats on them, but no pinch flats, which is pretty much unheard of for me when I trail ride on CX-type bikes, where my poor line-picking puts me in pinch flat land with regularity.

I run them both at 60 psi happily. Sometimes when I am doing all trails I'll squirt a bit of air out on the front to put me in the 50 psi neighborhood.

The knobbie profile is kind of perfect. It's grabby on the corners, which is what you want for banking in the thin-layer-of-sandy-over-hard-dirt of the HD trails. The same grabby corner knobbies slow me down a tad when cornering on pavement -- especially wet pavement.

And the center of the tire is flattish knobbies, which bite well at 60 psi on dirt and seem pretty benign on pavement. They roll surprisingly well on pavement. I commute on them all the time.

Kind of perfect.

December in Spokane.
Digging it.

These are not supple fancy squishy love bomb tires, but they're not awful either: a happy compromise for sure.

Come summer, I'll be back on my fancy white Grifo's, but for until then, I'm digging these.

Of course, like most rad bike things that I take a liking to, these tires appear to be no longer made, though still available until the stock runs out.