Forum chatter can do weird things to a product line. Spend enough time in Kona owner threads and you'll find riders still gushing about used Process 134s picked up secondhand — one guy in a Cycling Europe thread snagged a shop's forgotten 2021 build and called it "a ripper," while another posted a fit-check for a large Process 134 he's shopping for used. That's real enthusiasm for a real bike. What it is not is evidence that Kona has relaunched the Process as some new "X" variant for 2026. I went looking. It isn't there.
What Kona actually brought back is the Unit X — a rigid steel cromoly bikepacking and gravel-adjacent rig, not a gravity bike. Different animal entirely.
The Real Revival Is Steel, Rigid, and Built for Forest Roads — Not Berms
Kona's own description of the Unit X leans hard into bikepacking and long-haul touring territory: a Reynolds 520 butted cromoly frame, a rigid Kona Plus fork with 110mm spacing, and a 12-speed Shimano Deore drivetrain that can drop into single-speed mode if you're feeling austere, per the Campfire Cycling listing. Kona's marketing copy calls it a "passport to bikepacking adventures," built for forest roads and loaded touring rather than enduro stages, per the company's own blog post.
That's a legitimate, interesting move — steel rigid bikes have a durable cult following, and Kona (still headquartered in Ferndale, Washington, per that same blog post) leaning into that niche says something about where the company sees demand. But it tells us nothing about Kona's enduro ambitions. If you were hoping this signaled a modernized Process with a fresh suspension platform and a longer travel bump to compete with what Forbidden and Rocky Mountain have been doing in the gravity space, the sources just don't back that up.
What This Means for the Process's Place in the Enduro Conversation
Here's the thing about the Process 134 — it never actually left. The forum activity around it isn't nostalgia for a discontinued bike, it's current owners and shoppers treating a years-old platform as a perfectly viable trail and light-enduro machine right now. One rider in that fit-check thread is 6'2" and runs an XL, with an L as a "playful" alternative — the kind of granular sizing conversation that only happens around bikes people are actively buying and riding, not relics. That's worth noting for anyone in the Cascadia enduro scene eyeing a used Process: the platform has enough of a following that secondhand units are still getting snapped up and discussed seriously, per Cycling Europe.
What's missing is any sign Kona is putting fresh design energy there. Compare that to what we've tracked from Forbidden or Rocky Mountain's North Shore-focused R&D — both of those brands have been actively iterating on gravity-specific platforms with visible development cycles. Kona's visible 2026 energy, by contrast, is going toward steel adventure bikes. That's not a knock — somebody has to build the Unit X — but it does suggest Kona isn't currently the brand racing to update its enduro story for riders who want a new bike off the showroom floor rather than a well-loved used frame.
What I'd Actually Watch For
If you're a Cascadia rider holding out for a genuinely new Kona enduro platform, there's nothing in the current product calendar pointing that direction — the company's public-facing energy right now is bikepacking and gravel. That could change; brands shuffle development priorities constantly, and Kona has a long gravity pedigree to draw back on if the market pulls them that way. For now, the practical move for anyone shopping the Process name is the secondhand market, where the 134 is clearly still earning its keep on local trails. Keep an eye on Kona's model announcements heading into spring — if a Process refresh is coming, it'll show up there, not in a blog post about steel bikepacking rigs.