At some point I can’t remember when, someone I can’t remember who asked if I was going to comment on the new Surly Straggler:
Well, I don’t even know anything about the old Surly Straggler, let alone the new one, but I did watch their irreverent video:
Then I read an article about it:
It certainly seems like a fun, versatile, and straightforward bike, which is what you expect from Surly, but sadly I’ve reached the point in my life where I can’t appreciate any of that and instead just marvel at all the stuff that’s disappearing forever, like quick-release axles:
Tyre clearance is upped from 42mm to 50mm. Surly has done the inevitable and converted from 100mm front/135mm rear quick-release dropouts to 100mm/142mm 12mm-diameter thru-axles.
Yes, I know it’s long been over for the quick release and nobody cares, but it still amazes me. One day you’ll tell your kids about how to remove a bicycle wheel all you had to do was flip a lever and it popped right out and they won’t believe you. It seems too good to have ever been true, like those old photos of kids playing stickball in the middle of the street and doing swan-dives into the East River.
And of course Surly have added compatibility with stuff like dropper posts and gravel suspension forks, which no doubt you need to do in order to sell a bike like this in 2025, but being old and cranky I also can’t believe the cycling world has accepted these giant headtubes:
The Straggler still comes with a steel fork as standard, but the 44mm non-tapered head tube opens the option to fit a carbon fork or a gravel suspension fork.
Look, I know it’s a Surly and not some fancy custom, but even the budget-conscious steel bicycle rider shouldn’t be forced to live with the “skipping leg day” look:
I guess the aesthetics quickly force you to upgrade.
Hey, what do you want from me? I miss the old Surlys, and reading about the new Straggler just made me want to read about those instead. So I retreated to the 2007 catalog, since that’s the year I started this stupid blog. Of course there was the Cross-Check:
Which was of course killed by “progress:”
Gross.
Then there was the Pacer:
Fine, I’ll accept it may have been a losing proposition for Surly to keep selling a dirt-oriented bike with rim brakes in 2025. But the complete disappearance of the no-frills rim-brake road frame (with bonus fender mounts!) is hard for me to reconcile. That should be a staple. It’s like if Heinz discontinued regular ketchup and only offered the spicy flavors:
Sure, I guess there are enough metal road bike frames on the used market to sustain the next five generations, but it still seems like a net loss for humanity.
And how about that Karate Monkey?!?
Remember when there were mountain bikes that took either rim brakes or disc brakes? That was amazing. They were like those weird prehistoric fish that could also walk on land:
Of course I say all this having never actually bought a Surly. I mean sure, I’ve had Surlys (Surlies?), but thanks to my fleeting Internet fame (this blog was briefly popular during the period when mountain bikes took both rims and disc brakes) I didn’t have to resort to the indignity of purchasing them. For example, there was the Big Dummy, which was my first real experience with any sort of cargo bike, and which came to me when I was a new parent:
The bike was absolutely fantastic and it could not have been more timely, though eventually when I had less use for it I passed it along to a friend whose children were younger than mine.
Then there was the Travelers Check, which was basically just a Cross-Check with couplers, and which was a tad too small since that was the only size they had left:
That bike accompanied me on a book tour and many other trips and also served as what today would be considered a “gravel bike,” though you’ll notice that as a recovering cyclocross racer I still thought a 39×27 qualified as a “low gear.” I believe I took the above photo during a ride on Mount Tam, a full twelve years before I’d ride it again with Grant Petersen:
[Photo: Dan Leto]
Overall I’d say the Clem was far better suited to the task–though the Travelers Check served me very well overall (especially as a travel bike, it took a lot of trips and I never paid a single airline fee, good luck flying with a Clem), and even went singlespeed towards the end of my time with it:
I realize this was supposed to be about the Straggler, but when you get old you tend to ramble.