If you're looking for a traditional trail bike, you've come to the wrong place. Pack your stuff, say your goodbyes, and get out. But if you're on the hunt for the perfect shred sled—you know, a "trail bike" that you can take down DH trails, huck off blind drops, or plow through the rowdiest of rock gardens—you'll find yourself right at home on the Stumpjumper EVO Pro 27.5.

Who exactly is "EVO" for? EVO is for the shredders—the gnarliest trail riders who live for gravity riding. Big drops, huge kickers, rocks, roots—whatever you throw at it, the Stumpjumper EVO can handle it. EVO uses the same style-specific sizing that's featured on our Demo. This sizing lets you choose the bike that fits the way you ride—not just by the seat tube measurement, like with most bikes—and it narrows things down to two sizes, S2 and S3. These are longer, lower, slacker, and have seat tube and head tube heights that allow you to choose the size that best suits your style and terrain.

We started the construction by creating our own mountain-specific stiffness test, and then we looked at the layout with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to see where we could get the biggest stiffness improvements. This led to a big discovery: The Large and X-Large frames needed more front-end stiffness while the Smalls and Mediums were just fine. We were able to create a frame design that was 20% more efficient. And in the end, this proved to be one of the lightest trail frames on the market, today.

When designing the frame with the stiffness targets being a main goal, we developed a radical new sidearm design. The front-end and rear-end are connected at three points, and the sidearm helps keep all these points super stiff and connected, all while taking about 100 grams out of the rear-end. More explicitly, this minimizes frame flex when the rear suspension is active.

We continued down the suspension path with a custom Rx Trail Tune at the rear shock. Suspension performance is highly dependent on frame, wheel, and rider size, so we use our Rx Tune to get each bike to land in the middle of the adjustment spectrum, and this gives you the biggest possible range to fine-tune your ride. Another focal point of the tune was matching the suspension characteristics between wheel sizes—we developed a specific Rx Tune for each platform. This way, you'll get perfectly linear suspension.

Steps were also taken to make this bike easy to live with. Threaded bottom brackets make a triumphant return, and we made room for up to a 3.0" tire. You're also free to run whatever aftermarket rear shock you want, since we're using standard metric shocks. We revamped the SWAT™ box, too, making it sleeker, lighter, and with more volume. And customization is furthered with a Flip Chip that lets you to dial-in your Stumpy to your riding style. Switch it from High to Low and it drops your bottom bracket 6mm and slackens the head tube by half-a-degree. Little details also jump out to surprise you, like a newly designed ribbed chainstay protector that makes chain slap a thing of the past and nearly silences the drivetrain. Lastly, we seriously couldn't make cable routing any easier on carbon models. Full tubes can be found throughout the carbon frame, so all you have to do is push the cable and it'll come out the other end. No more lazy loop, hidden stashes of magnets, pokey spokes, or pillows to cry in.

We kept the "get gnarly" motto going with the build kit of the Stumpjumper EVO Pro, spec'ing it with Fox front and rear suspension, bomb-proof Roval Traverse Carbon 27.5 wheels, and a 12-speed SRAM GX Eagle groupset.