I am looking at a new bike for long single day rides and 2-3 night bikepacking weekends. Primary location is Southern California and Eastern Sierra (e.g. Lone Pine, Bishop, Mammoth Lakes).
Interested in people's experience riding in those areas, and thoughts on a hardtail with a 100mm or 120mm fork versus a dropbar 29er with MTB hub spacing, rigid fork, and wider bars.
I read through the route plans on bikepacking.com, most trip guides for the regions I have in mind lean toward flat bar/MTB, but I have always been interested in the dropbar/MTB combination bikes and am interested if folks have tried those with success in So Cal and Eastern Sierra.
by Certain-Run-1043
4 Comments
It’s a trade off. You’ll be underbiking sometimes and overbiking other times. One person told me to get the bike that matches what I ride, not want I think I’ll ride. That being said I’d probably go for a hardtail. Have two sets of tires. One for trails and chunk and a set for gravel. I had a hardtail for a while and after moving to VT I built up a Salsa Fargo. Great on pretty much everything except I’ll avoid harder MTB trails.
I’m a big fan of the drop-bar 29er form factor for a lot of bikepacking applications, and especially if you can build one up with a 100mm suspension fork (which will require a suspension-corrected setup that many frames can’t accommodate). One of my favorite drop-bar 29ers, for example – the Curve Cycling GMX+ – can be set up either drop bar or flat bar, but isn’t suspension corrected.
That said, knowing the “east side,” I think a flat bar, suspension setup would be better. There’s a lot of flat, open road to travel and non-technical decomposing granite trails but, more importantly, there’s a lot of off-road terrain that can have a lot of vertical elevation gain/loss and technical riding that seems better suited to a more traditional flat bar configuration.
At the end of the day, though, it’s all about personal preference and your skills.
I haven’t tried a drop bar MTB in SoCal but I have taken my drop bar MTB on some of the more technical trails around here and I am always pleasantly surprised with how well it performs and how ‘composed’ it feels riding it where I would take even a full suspension.
Like, people probably choose hard tails for those trails for a reason, undoubtedly, but more and more I am learning that most improvements in geo/suspension/etc are fairly marginal and you can take your rigid drop bar MTB anywhere you would want within reason.
It really depends on what you currently ride. Are you looking for a “one bike for everything'” ride or something to expand/different than the bike(s) you already have? The Eastern Sierras benefit from plus tires (2.5″ or wider). That can be hand in dropbar and flatbar MTBs. My preference for the same region is 120mm hardtail for all-day offroad epics & bikepacking.