Black Mountain Cycles La Cabra: A Goat in the Alps

We all have that one-of-a-kind friend. The one with the niche gear that can ignite a conversation if the right people are around. In my bike bubble, that friend is Alessandro. He owns that very cool bike you've only seen online or on Instagram from a cool shop in a faraway land.

Alessandro was in the middle of moving and had too many bikes to shuffle at once, so I volunteered to bike-sit for a little while. That bike is a Black Mountain Cycles La Cabra, ferried to Italy by a mutual friend who called in a favour. What started as a small package from the UK arrived as an XL bike box.

Who's Black Mountain Cycles

Black Mountain Cycles, founded by Mike Varley, is a small shop in Point Reyes Station, California. After years of designing bikes for Masi and Haro, Varley made the leap to his own line of steel, go-anywhere machines made to be ridden, not babied.

La Cabra (The Goat in Spanish) aims to resolve the drop bar plus big tire dilemma: a drop bar-style mountain bike frame with generous tire clearance, a sleek as steel segmented fork, and a geometry tuned for confidence when the trail turns rough. Mike speaks about La Cabra's roots, dating back to 1988, when he first experimented with drop bars on a mountain bike. Decades later, after gravel went mainstream and riders rediscovered the comfort of multiple hand positions, he turned that idea into a purpose-built frame.

Born as an offshoot of their Monstercross Disc, La Cabra quickly became something on its own: a proper drop-bar mountain bike bred for the trails.

I spent two weeks with this Alpine Green beast built with a 1x GRX RX820 drivetrain, wide-range XT 10-51 cassette for the steep stuff, Hope Pro 4 purple hubs, and a OneUp 180 mm dropper. This build likes real mountains and screams, “Look at me!”

On steep, loose climbs, the gearing keeps my cadence alive, while the 2.35” Vittoria Mezcal tires crush any hesitation along a battered singletrack. The dropper ensures proper body position on steep, rooty descents, and the Shimano MT500 callipers, squeezing big rotors, make me feel safe enough on long dirt descents.

With more MTB skills than I currently have, it would be that old-fashioned kind of fun you don't overthink, you just pedal and go. La Cabra in the rough doesn't shout. It just bleats and goes.

When I First Met The Goat

I wanted the first spin to be on familiar ground: rocky alpine trails where a mountain goat belongs, so I headed toward the Valgrisenche Valley, just below the Ruitor Glacier, into the kind of valley where the air smells of pine resin and glacier melt.

The plan was a well-known loop that starts with a short drop to wake up the legs, followed by a river-carved circuit that hops bank to bank on narrow paths and wooden bridges, threading along hydropower service roads beside the collector canal, and finally winds up to the lake of the Beauregard dam complex.

Coming off the aggressive geometry of my Surly Midnight Special, I immediately felt welcomed on The Goat and settled into a comfortable position. Only minutes into a wet, late-summer morning, my ears filled with "Born Slippy" by Underworld, which better suited the weather. I was already bombing down a slippery singletrack with unexpected confidence on a bike I was riding for the first time. Front-end stability was planted, handling was felt dialled in, and stopping power in check. I even pushed myself to bunny hop some roots on the first proper descent.

By 8:00 am, I was ordering a dark roast and a croissant, glossy with butter on the plate, as a wall of clouds darker than my coffee stacked over me. It didn't feel like a warning but more like a soundtrack. I sipped, tapping out a message to my friend about how good the La Cabra felt, and rolled back out into the looming weather.

On tarmac, I could feel the mass and bite of the 2.35″ tires, but the moment it tipped into muddy, steep ground, those thoughts disappeared. The 10-51 cassette kept cadence alive, and traction stayed glued even without clipped-in pedals. The bike turned effort into steady, quiet elevation.

Geometry of a Goat

Note that this isn't a full-blown review, but first-ride impressions from a non-expert cyclist. While a bit of a nerd, I'm not a bike geometry geek, so I lean on our own BGDB primer for the for meaning of numbers like stack, reach, and trail. These are the trio that shape how a bike fits and steers. If those terms feel fuzzy, that article is a solid refresher.

The frame is 22″, now that's a big bike. The factory chart shows a reach of 403mm and a stack of 684mm, with BB drop 70mm, chainstays at 444mm and a 50mm offset fork.

In practice, La Cabra's higher stack allows us to stay relaxed during a long ride while maintaining a good reaction time on those chattering descents. This tall stack also means that the drop-down position is actually usable while off-roading. The reach seems at an everyday sweet spot. The front wheel is in front of us, while the bike doesn't give the perception of being slow at turning. La Cabra is intentionally a “classic MTB” in posture compared to many modern 29ers.

The segmented fork is made of the same double-butted steel as the frame. This is not a suspension-corrected frame, so swapping to a suspension fork is not a good idea. The fork is like a bike's front leg, and La Cabra was designed to have a short, rigid steel fork for quick, precise steering. Adding a suspension fork, which is taller, would change the front geometry, moving the front wheel further away. This creates a slow, sluggish, floppy steering on everything but steep descents.

When you first ride La Cabra, you feel “in the bike,” and this sensation is a result of the reach, stack and center of gravity from the low bottom bracket drop—which is only a drawback in really technical rock gardens—otherwise, the feeling of being stuck to the ground for mixed-surface riding is a win for me.

Standards That Make Sense

Being more of a mountain bike rather than a gravel bike, the La Cabra is built to solid mountain bike specs, boost spacing and BSA Threaded 73mm bottom bracket, which means that this bike can fit a wide range of gearing setups. La Cabra uses the standard post-mount brake callipers, which can get a little bit tricky to set up with drop bar hydraulic brake levers. Going mechanical would be the easiest option, but with a little tinkering, you can use hydraulic road brake levers with post-mount MTB callipers. The seatpost is a 30.9 mm with internal routing for a dropper post.

The frame is quite generous with bosses: triple mounts on the fork blades, triple under the downtube, bottle mounts inside the triangle (two on smaller frames, three on the larger), plus front and rear rack and fender mounts. There's provision for dynamo lights, too. In plain language: it's built to carry real kit without improvising.

Eating Up The Alps

Two weeks on La Cabra had me tackling rougher ground beyond my norm, allowing me to explore more of the north-western Italian Alps by bike than by foot. I was so close to buying a front-suspension hardtail when I tried this frame, yet after only a few rides, that idea was gone. La Cabra doesn't dull the trail so much as organize it—turning chaos into a pattern you can thread the bike right on through.

Out on the trail, the bike was never the limit. I was. There wasn't a single moment when I wished for a different rig to avoid a hike-a-bike. If anything, the opposite happened: sections that used to force a dab here or a walk there on my Surly Midnight Special clicked into place for me when on La Cabra.

One climb took me toward Colle del Sommeiller, a high, rough road where drop-bar bikes are rare. Sommeiller tops out around 2993m and is often cited as one of Europe's highest drivable roads. Even when the trail turns awkward with tight, rocky hairpins, rain-cut ruts or corners chewed up by hard braking, La Cabra stays composed and manageable rather than masochistic.

Another day in the Alps, Valpelline this time, was the final proof. We touched every type of surface, including a few hike-a-bike stretches, which clearly showed the penalty of an XL steel frame with fork plus bags. I paid that tax in jelly candies and stubbornness to keep the ride alive.

The trail then dealt a perfect shuffle, to a staccato of short, brutally steep ramps that spiked the heart rate, followed by a gently descending plateau where the pines blurred into the background and speed came easy. The doubletrack funnelled down to singletrack with dry mineral soil, scattered solitary rocks. My definition of “gravel paradise” had just been redefined.

But the next section is where the La Cabra really earned its name: the singletrack merged into a wider alpine road paved in ugly, football-sized rock and serpentine switchbacks that erased hard-won elevation in a handful of turns.

True to its namesake, the La Cabra picked its way down in a clean, controlled manner. Safely to the bottom with no dabs. That's what counts.

This bike adds a layer of psychological confidence I didn't know I was missing. It pushes you a little past your comfort zone, onto that singletrack you'd usually skip. La Cabra makes smart use of the rider's skills or lack thereof. Call it a proper Adventure Bike if you will. A drop bar rig that expands the map instead of just surviving it. After 8 hours, I wasn't wrecked, and after 10, I was still making clean, confident choices.

A big part of this equation is tire clearance. You can run the same wide rubber you'd trust on a mountain bike. On pavement, the ride is fine, maybe not the smoothest or quickest in drop-bar land, but I wouldn't expect something different.

Adding bags and racks makes it feel more planted yet only a touch slower. I'll gladly take those trade-offs to make the rough stuff feel easy. Even loaded, the La Cabra stays calm and collected; no springy flex, no spaghetti feel, but instead a steady, reassuring answer every time you point it somewhere interesting.

The Goat Summed Up

Black Mountain Cycles seems to have cracked the recipe for a do-it-all, modern drop-bar frame that gets better as the terrain gets worse, without too many unexpected trade-offs on fast gravel or tarmac. Would a front-suspension mountain bike cover similar ground with comparable speed and comfort? Probably, but that's a debate for another day.

Will I jump to a different frame (like this one) after these two weeks? Maybe, maybe not, but that's not the point. If you're looking for one bike to live with for a bikepacking lifestyle, this could genuinely be it, starting at an attainable price of $1195 USD.

I'm lucky enough to have this one a text away, ready to borrow for an overnighter where the map turns grey just out of my comfort zone, but the bottom line: the La Cabra didn't make me a better rider, it made better use of the rider I am. Rugged trails stopped feeling like a test and started to feel like the place to set myself free.

Huge thanks to my friend Ale: You didn't just lend me your frame; you handed me permission to go explore.