Photos by Logan Gallagher
A Pair of Wheels for Rampage
A couple of weeks before Rampage, Tyler McCaul sent us a message saying Jaxson Riddle was looking for some wheels for the event and wondered if we could make something work. Between who Jaxson is, what Rampage means, and Tyler putting his name behind the ask, it was the kind of opportunity you get pretty effin’ excited about.
It was also one of those messages where you don’t have to spend very long thinking about the answer. Jaxson is one of Red Bull’s freeride athletes, and he'd been selected to ride Rampage. We had an opportunity to put something we make underneath him at one of the most important events in mountain biking.
Rampage has occupied a strange place in mountain biking for as long as a lot of us can remember. Racing tells us who can get down a mountain fastest. Slopestyle gives riders a purpose-built canvas for tricks and progression. But Rampage has always existed somewhere slightly outside both. Riders arrive in the Utah desert, look at a piece of mountainside that most sensible people would struggle to imagine walking down, then spend the better part of 10 days figuring out how to turn it into something rideable.
This year carried a little more weight as well. Twenty-five years after the first Rampage, the event returned to the original venue on Kolob Terrace Road in Virgin, Utah, for its 20th edition. There is something special about taking the modern version of freeride back to the piece of desert where so much of it started.
Jaxson has his own history there too. He grew up down the road, started riding the old Rampage terrain as a teenager, and made his Rampage debut in 2021, taking Best Style. He won the same award again in 2022 and picked up Best Trick in 2025 with a heelclicker backflip. His riding has always carried a heavy motocross influence, and at this point his way of moving a bike is recognizable long before you see his name in the caption.
The wheel build started with a pair of 32-hole Enduro V3 rear rims. Rather than building a standard Enduro V3 wheelset, we used the same rear rim at both ends and built everything else around Jaxson’s bike and what he needed for Rampage. We went with silver spokes and silver nipples because they look dope, obviously, then used our XL ratchet hub in the rear and a prototype HUNT 20 × 110 mm hub at the front.
It wasn’t especially complicated. We needed to build a set of wheels for a world-class freerider heading into the Utah desert to ride terrain that looks like it belongs on the moon. Sometimes there doesn’t need to be much more of a story behind a wheel build than that. The bit I like is that there was nothing special about the rims. They were simply 32-hole Enduro V3 rear rims, the same ones we already had before Tyler ever sent the message.
Unfortunately, Rampage didn’t get the ending anyone wanted. Weather moved in during the men’s event, and only nine riders managed to complete a full run before conditions forced things to stop. Jaxson was one of them and was sitting second when the event was called. There wouldn’t be an official podium, but watching him drop into that line with a pair of HUNT wheels was still pretty surreal. We spend a lot of time talking about product validation, but sometimes it can be much simpler than that. We had the chance to put our rims underneath one of the best freeriders in the world at Rampage, and when the opportunity came, they were the rims we trusted enough to use.
