YETI ARC

If there's a more iconic mountain bike than the Yeti ARC, we must've missed it. The ARC harkens back to the glory days of the NORBA national series. Everywhere you looked, there were pictures of John Tomac, Missy Giove and Juli Furtado astride their turquoise and yellow Yeti hardtails, delivering punishment from Mammoth to Mt. Snow.

The unmistakable style remains, but the ARC isn't nearly the same bike that it used to be -- it's better. What started as an employee's obsession, to shave weight from the racer's 5lb+ bikes, ended in a long term collaboration with Easton that resulted in development of finer tubesets along a pathway that took them from steel, through an experimental composites stage, and finally to aluminum. The current iteration of the Yeti ARC is optimized for pure power transfer. The 7005 aluminum tubeset is internally butted to reduce unnecessary weight, and adds the benefit of higher ride quality. It's stiff as you'd expect from a hardtail, but the Yeti Pure tubing gives way just enough to keep your teeth intact on long descents.

Yeti chose to stick with tradition by retaining the looped stay design on the back end of the bike. Their mantra was "vertical compliance" back in the day, and it still is. We think the stylistic connection to their history is just as important. It's unmistakable -- it is a Yeti ARC. These days a replaceable derailleur hanger graces the back of the dropout, and it's also disc brake compatible.

The ARC is available in Turquoise/white and in four sizes -- XS, Small, Medium, and Large. It takes a 27.2mm seatpost and a standard 1-1/8" press-in headset. The top tube cable routing dictates a top-pull 31.8mm low clamp front derailleur. It has geometry optimized for a 100mm travel fork.

For information on Yeti's 5 year warranty on the ARC click here.

US Yeti dealers are prohibited from shipping Yeti bicycles outside of the US, Canada, or Mexico.

2012 Yeti ARC Pricing