Originally Posted by
dsaul
I ride my gravel bike on MTB trails all the time. As a very experienced mountain biker, I find it more challenging to tackle trail features on a drop bar bike, but that is part of the fun for me. With you being road rider with little MTB experience, I would expect you to have more trouble dealing with those trail features.
I've found that setting up my bars so that they are higher and closer to me, than I would use on my road bike, helps a lot. You need to be in the drops for trail riding, so that you can keep a finger on the brake levers. It helps a lot to have the bike set up so that you are comfortable being in the drops and can still keep your head up to look far enough down the trail to see the next obstacle and prepare for it.
I think that's the bottom line, drop bar bikes are not really made for mountain biking and it takes a pretty good mountain biker to use them well in ways most appropriately ridden on a mountain bike. I'm planning on putting a dropper post on my gravel bike, it's pretty scary on a lot of the double track around here, and forget it on singletrack. The main trail down out of the mountains near here takes me less than an hour on my mountain bike, and I have never done it in less than 2 hours on my gravel bike.