We got a pair of Teravail’s newest gravel tire called the Washburn. The Washburn comes in Tan – Light and Supple or Durable and Black – Light and Supple or Durable. I prefer black tires, so the gnomes in the supply chain made sure to send us a set of tanwall durable casing tires to test. Tanwalls are trendy these days. It’s not really a trend that I follow, but you may like them.
The Washburns combine a slick center strip with typical gravel knobbiness on each shoulder. The packaging says that they’re for rough roads and gravel. That really appealed to me because that’s exactly the sort of riding that happens right out my barn door here in South Central Wisconsin. America’s roads are maintained at a level of roughness that suits this sort of tread pattern and our gravel in this part of the US is what might be called ‘gentlemen’s gravel’. Smooth crushed limestone calls for a pretty smooth tire and the center of the Washburns are as smooth as a baby’s butt.
After unboxing our new gravel shoes, we threw them on our Park Tools Digital scale and they weighed in at 580g and 584g each. When laid out flat, the bead to bead measured 96 mm and the tread to tread was 49 mm edge to edge. Our test tires came with more than just tan-colored durable sidewalls. They’re tubeless-ready and feature Teravail’s fast-rolling rubber compound (bonus!) I like to go fast!
The two tires set up tubeless as easy as most modern tubeless-ready tires do. We mounted them on a set of WTB rims that belong to a Salsa Cutthroat. Mounted on the 23mm wide rims and given a day or two to settle into their environment at 40 psi the Washburns inflate the tire’s casing to 41.6mm wide.
The fat-bike.com Colonel Steve Austin Jet Propulsion Laboratories are carved into the top of a Drumlin, which means that every ride starts with a screaming downhill followed by an equal amount of a climb. One of my favorite local spots situated on a neighboring drumlin takes me down a gravel two-track that is regularly festooned with puddles with a greasy strip of grass and mud down the middle. The downhill starts as chip’n seal pavement before it transitions to gravel. (with a nice little lip to jump off) Near the bottom of the elevation, just about the time that the bike approaches the mid to high twenty MPH (danger gnome), there are some big pot holes that make the wet muddy grass strip in the center of the road, the best line. Not being the sharpest tool in the shed, I didn’t really think about that until I was at the point where I was hurtling down that bit of wet greasy track. My mind flashed pictures in my brain of the smooth strip of (for lack of a better term) tread on the Washburns that set off several warning lights on my central nervous system’s survival instincts but everything worked out fine and I stopped to take the photo above. I look forward to more thrilling miles of gravel propulsion on this new set of sneakers. They feel fast and fun (so far). I’m back piling up multi-surface miles between dirt rides and I’ve got a pretty sweet ~20 mile commute to the Bicycle Doctor that is 95% gravel. The other 5% is rural pavement. It’s no coincidence that the tire that I’m testing is made for rough rural roads and gravel because that’s how we roll in the Big Whiskey. It shouldn’t take me too long to rack up five-hundred miles on these babies, so I’ll check back with a full review then!
For more information about the Teravail Washburn visit – teravail.com