I did a Texas hill country ride with lower gears a couple weeks ago and gearing seemed perfect. I only had to go to first gear a couple times right at the top of some big climbs. Front chainring is 46 and cassette is 10-36. I lose the 14 and 16 tooth cogs I get with the 10-28 cassette but when I ran a 2x set up, I'd also lose at least one small cog when running a 11-28 on the Shimano set up. So I'm happy with the 1x set up.
In this pic, I'm running 28mm tires (measure 30) vs the 30mm (measure 32) on the original build. I wanted to get it as light as possible for the hill country rides but now that I've tried it, I'm going back to 30mm for all rides.
