Didnt you sell the ecr? what gear range did it have, I can t recall. Given that you rode that bike with your stuff on it, it would be a good reference for the load weight and what sort of hills you expect to be on.
given that you (I assume) are still going to use this bike for the divide ride, the lower top gear really wont come into play very much, but as Im sure youve figured out, having a bunch of nice low gears is just plain handy as heck.
You also know by now that I dont get teh whole double and single vs a triple thing, but the range of gear inches you mention will be a great range for what you want to do with the bike.
to recap my troll setup, it goes from 16.7 to 104, and I used all gears regularly in my travels with the troll, three trips now, and find it to be a great range for the 40, 50, maybe 60 lbs of stuff that Ive had on it.
that high is close to my second top gear (44-13) which is 87g.i and then 103 for my top gear (44-11) this with the 2in tires.
If I had to, I'd easily lose the 103, but I dont have to and its nice to have it to spin up to about 50 or 55kph, 30mph and a bit, but Im a natural spinner and get up to a cadence of at least 120 and feel fine---but we always come back to how nice it is to have a nice low gear.
get back to us with what the ecr had, and how you felt its range was given the amount of load you plan to carry and doing trail riding with steep hills.
Still have and much-love the ECR. Its a tank. 28 front, and 11-46 cassette. I originally had a 32 front, and I may go back to it. Limited by the 29+ wheel size for decent lows. I may return to the 32T front or even a slightly higher number of teeth, but its a decent medium-effort setup for me at the least. I'm a "sweat-my-buns-off" up the hill sort of guy, and coast and drink/eat on the downhill anyway. If I do an average of 15 mph for the day, I'm happy.