Road, or at least drop-bar friendly reach/stack/HTA/STA in a non-mtb heavy frame
Disc brakes
Your choices were rather limited.
Salsa La Cruz.
Steelwool Tweed.
Traitor Ruben.
Singular Peregrine.
Rawland dSogn.
Vassago WTF
Probably a handful of cx/commuter bikes I’m forgetting.
I’m sure there are others I am missing, but pickins were slim. I did a LOT of shopping for that kind of bike, and ended up owning 3 on that list. Tire clearance almost always topped out around 38.
I also looked at converting rim-braked stuff like a Crosscheck or LHT. Or finding a “hybrid” that had OK tire clearance and a reasonable reach/stack to convert to drop bar. Or a nicer lightweight 29er that could be set up with a non-sus corrected rigid fork and maintain OK angles and reach/stack to work with drops.
I had this thing for a while, I think 2010-2013 or so. It was a mid 2000’s fancy steel hybrid that was by accident basically a proto-coffee grinder. 72.5 HTA IIRC, low BB and like 415-420mm CS
Rear tire clearance was a weak point. I crimped it and could run 32s and fenders or 35s without.
I rode it to a university cycling club social and some dude asked me about it. I think I referred to it as my cx bike and he told me cx bikes don’t have disc brakes. I told him who cares because even road bikes will have disc brakes soon. He laughed in my face and said road racing bikes will never have discs. Who’s laughing now smug cycling club asshole?
I grew up in the Bay Area and was fully into cyclocross, Bridgestone/Ritchey underbiking, Jobst rides.
I went to college in Davis, California which is central valley ag town surrounded by 20 miles of tomato fields in every direction. Riding dirt farms roads and levees made things more interesting.
First sort of purpose built dirt road thing was this, inspired by the extra long reach Kogswell brakes and Henry Kingman’s PBP Riv LongLow that was at Interbike one year:
After this was a Trek 760 road frame built up with 650A Schwalbe Marathons and a triple, but I don’t have pics. Heavily influenced by Blackbird SF and the Jack Taylor Rough Stuff bikes.
Then in 2005 Trans-Iowa happend and Ira Ryan’s lugged road bike with cantis seemed super dope so I built something similar. Later I moved to Nebraska. Here it is set up for Odin’s Revenge #2:
I moved to Colorado and found the Winter Rallye rides. Then the Resist Nomad 700x45 came out, so that frame got crimped to clear it in the rear. Next frame took the geometry further towards gravel “racing” and could take 29er xc tires. Started looking at handlebar bags and thinking about trail. This frame did the next two Odinses, geared , then singlespeed.
Fred’s bikes popped up around here. I knew I wanted low trail and fat tires, but big wheels seemed to complicate that, so I started designed a low trail dirt rando based on the 26" Stans Crow tires. As I working on that Jan dropped the RTP which seemed like the universe was saying something (it wasn’t). 2015 according to Flickr. This bike is now dithering river ditches.
Gravel was now a thing and there were more big 700c tires so I built this one, not low trail but road bike BB height and “progressive” geometry (70/74) with 700x48s and room for bigger:
Then I left the midwest and starting riding MTBs again and had some epiphanies about fit, so the next gravel bike is going to look very different. Coming soon…
Oh hey I also went to UCD (same time as @oogens), can attest that there’s some fun dirt/gravel not that far south of campus. Though atmo the most adventurous traction experience was riding the paved ag roads during tomato harvest when they were basically coated in an inch or two of marinara
grew up in davis over here and I remember one bored summer day I blew out the tires of almost every bike in the house taking them one by one to run alongside the star thistle-strewn dirt paths along putah creek, first getting a flat on my ten speed, walking home, getting my brother’s hybrid, a flat, a walk home. I stopped after I flatted my mom’s bike. You’d have thought I would have gotten a patch kit and a frame pump at some point.
I feel like if you replaced “ATB” with “full suspension” and “road bike” with “hardtail”, that would be a current article, word for word about modern mountain bikes.
In 2008 I did a team relay multisport event that had a “Mountain Bike” leg that was actually about equal thirds hardpack singletrack/gravel/pavement.
The rules stated you had to ride a “mountain bike” as defined by flat bars and tires that had 26x or 29x on the sidewall.
I procured these Bontrager Jones XR-Dry 29x1.75 tires, which at the time was the skinniest “29er” labeled tire I could find (I worked at a shop and did a lot of searching).
Less than 10 days before the event I found this frame at the co-op and viola, my 29er TT bike was born.
The race went really, really well. And the pavement portion convinced me that nice light/supple yet fatty 700c tires would be awesome as an all-arounder for Seattle commuting, urban exploration, and gravel roads.
