WTB Ranger Tire

The perfect tire does not exist. WTB made great tires for 20 years, then sort of faded away from the spotlight. A few years ago, they did a massive redesign on their tires (and rims) and came out with a few designs that truly rock the casbah. The Ranger is our favorite of the line up. It was made for bike packing, and it excels on fully rigid bikes. We like it for class four roads, dirt roads, occasional pavement, wet rocks, dry rocks, single track and bike packing. Grippy, fast rolling (for a knobby), good on pretty much every sort of terrain you’d encounter on a bike packing trip. 

Get a Meiser pressure gauge to really dial in these tires. They are big enough to run at very low pressures, and the lower the pressure, the more critical the exact PSI. In other words, if you have a tire at 40 psi and remove 5 pounds of pressure, you’ve reduced the pressure by 13.33%. But if you have a 19 psi tire, and take out 5 psi, you’ve reduced the pressure by over 30%. That means you can noticeably impact pressure and thereby ride quality by adding or subtracting as little as 2 PSI. Floor pumps can not accurately measure that. So get a mid level floor pump, inflate the tire to 25 PSI, and then use the Meiser gauge to dial the pressure down to a more appropriate pressure.  

Mount these tires to rims with an inner width of 30mm or more.  Examples include the Rollcii MTA30, the Velocity Blunt 35 and the Spank 359+.