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What you can do:
Rodd Heino (center back) in a rough-road race on 30 mm Grand Bois Cypres tires.
Smooth gravel roads can be ridden with all sizes of Grand Bois tires.
Are Grand Bois Tires Fragile?
It depends!
Grand Bois tires optimized for comfort and speed. To achieve this goal, their supple, lightweight casing flexes more easily than that of utilitarian tires.
The downside is that these tires are more fragile. Not so fragile that you cannot ride them on gravel at all, but if you tend to get a lot of flats on any tire, these might not be for you. And if you ride in very technical terrain with sharp rocks that can cut the sidewalls, you may want to choose other tires.
Most riders get thousands of miles of good service out of these tires, with very few flats. Generally, the wider the tire, the longer it lasts and the fewer flats it gets.
Most of all, the Grand Bois tires allow you to experience the speed and feel of a high-performance tire on all road surfaces.
Where supple tires reach their limits:
We ride the wider Grand Bois on some very rough gravel roads in the Pacific Northwest, but our rocks have been rounded by the last glaciation. If you ride over very sharp rocks like these in Arizona, the thin, supple sidewalls of Grand Bois tires may suffer cuts. Craig Montgomery has destroyed a several 700C x 30 mm tires on these "roads." Wider tires, like the 650B x 42 mm Grand Bois Hetres, might help here, too.
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