Tourist in MSN

Not bikepacking, but a friend of mine organized a trip for 10 of us to ride the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park. The other nine in the group rode full suspension mountain bikes, those that did not own mountain bikes rented for the trip.

I however decided to use my expedition bike since it was a very robust bike. I bought a suspension fork for it and rode that instead of a mountain bike. Thus, I was essentially riding a hard tail mountain bike that had usually long chainstays and drop bars.

I was the only one in the group that had drop bars. Everybody else with a mountain bike had flat bars, a couple of them could not figure out how I could even ride the trail with drop bars. And most of those that were riding mountain bikes also ride carbon road bikes when at home. Thus, they were quite used to using both kinds of bars. There were a few times that I wished I had more leverage on the bars, but there were a few times on better parts of the road pushing into strong headwinds that some of the others were jealous that I had drop bars.

I think it just comes down to slow speed difficult terrain and needing more leverage for steering for mountain biking.

You need to decide what kind of bikepacking you want to do. Bikepacking can be off road where you are essentially riding a mountain bike with extra stuff strapped on. Or, bikepacking can be on a skinny tired road bike on pavement. Or anything in between. Bikepacking does not establish what kind of bars you should use, instead the riding conditions does.

Tourist in MSN

A friend of mine switched to bull horns about 7 years ago for touring. He never used the drops on drop bars, so for him bull horns made a lot of sense. He is running bar end shifters on them.