From all-day group rides lapping our favorite trails to ripping alpine singletrack at Mach speed, the Santa Cruz Hightower is our choice time and time again due to its versatile and capable design. The Santa Cruz Hightower is a 29-inch trail bike with 145mm of VPP rear travel, capable of plowing through demanding downhills yet is remarkably supportive for grinding up fire roads. This iteration of the Hightower gets longer, slacker geometry with a 64. 5-degree headtube angle (low position), delivering a stable platform for navigating super steep trails and high-speed flow lines. Santa Cruz also revised the Hightower's suspension kinematics, reducing the anti-squat in the first 40 percent of travel to improve suspension sensitivity in both climbing and descending scenarios. A more linear leverage curve allows for more support in the mid-stroke and more bottom-out resistance, with a progressive drop in the last third of travel. The 76. 4-degree seat tube angle allows us to get into a powerful yet comfortable position for long climbs, and size-specific chain stays and seat tube angles allow riders of every size to get the perfect fit. For those hard-charging days, the Hightower allows us to use the flip chip in the rear shock link to change the geometry, making it longer, lower, and slacker for riding steeper and faster lines. The Hightower comes with the Glovebox integrated frame storage allowing us to store our tools, a tube, and even some snacks in the downtube, and a Sag window allows us to set and read our sag easier by utilizing a small cutout in the frame. The GX Eagle Transmission build of the Santa Cruz Hightower offers an impressive bang for our buck and offers some of the newest components on the market. Santa Cruz's Carbon C frame gives us an incredibly lightweight and stiff frame that is built to the same qualifications as Santa Cruz's higher-end Carbon CC frame. SRAM's impressively efficient and durable GX Eagle Transmission drivetrain shifts instantly ...