Originally Posted by markhr
a few bad stories but they tend to be along the lines of "caused economic disaster in third world countries, rains of frogs and plagues of locusts" so I've always taken them with a LARGE pinch of salt. Not to say don't check but do talk to as many people as you can.
There are quite a few XC bikes with rohloff hubs as standard - check
http://www.rohloff.de/en/info/bikesearch/index.html - it's not exhaustive but it's a start
Thanks for the link -- I didn't see any American bikes, but the second pass through, Brodie has a hardtail frame that has dropouts capable of this hub. I guess I'm going to search and price how much a DS MTB would cost with this drivetrain. If its a reputable frame maker (and the frame is designed for a Rohloff hub in mind, either with a disc brake mounting and vertical dropouts, or the Rohloff specific dropouts), the bike if assembled and specced properly will be a hard to kill beast, assuming I didn't start bouncing off of house-sized boulders with it, or get it stolen.
One grand for a hub is expensive (the only real disadvantage for a lot of uses), but its not too unreasonable when realize that you don't need a FD, RD, multiple chainrings, etc. It has a lot of nice little features, like not having cables be under tension, low maintainence (change the oil every 1500 miles or so).