I currently ride a 2008 Surly LHT with Smart Sam half knobbies and and an ebay seat post suspension that works quite well on mild offroad, but I'm tired of racking my junk when things get gnarlier.
I use an adjustable seat post and live by it so much that I personally found it worth packing around it (as in, foregoing a seat pack) to keep that as an option.
I've never had anything but a hard steel frame, however after trying my mother's (comically small) Trek Carbon Lush I'm now sold on full suspension.
I bikepack with a full suspension 29er - it's fine.
where I live (high Sierras - it snowed a few weeks ago in July)
Do tell... I live in the low Sierras (highway 108 corridor).
Is it possible to mount a front or rear rack on a full suspension bike? I understand there is likely to be interference with a traditional style mount, but has anyone overcome this?
Yes - to keep my suspension seat post viable, I went with a rear rack and full panniers. Tons of room (and there's still some room on top of the rack as well). I haven't looked at front panniers yet with the singular exception of a month-long bikepacking trip through Japan. There, however, I brought an older, beater bike that I was "okay" with having lost or stolen (an old 2000 Schwinn Mesa GS), and I finagled a front rack onto that thing. I think Old Man Mountain makes front suspension racks if you're so inclined.
I did some googling and I found a company called Old Man Mountain (OMM) who make a line of front and rear racks called the Sherpa that supposedly work with FS bikes due to their unique mount points. I'm going to do more research, but maybe someone here has experience with them?
Their Sherpa is what I use. Besides working with the full suspension, it does two things for me: 1) if the seat post can't get my butt low enough for a drop, I will hang trou over my rear tire. While I don't sit on the rack, it does let me get very far down without my shorts catching on my tire. 2) This bike, like several other full-suspension ones apparently, suffered from pretty severe brake judder. Apparently many people went after trying to tune their brakes to fix this, but this judder comes from harmonic resonance up the seat stays when braking (as it sends some force directly up them and into the shock for this design). The Old Man Mountain rack clamps onto the seat stays in the middle, which broke that resonance, and cured the judder. They're built pretty well... I hauled an oak tree stump off a mountain with it once.
Besides carrying a backpack
I finally got rid of mine when I found a handlebar bag that comes with a water bladder. This got the water off my back and my rack got my tools off my back, and it's sooooo refreshing to ride packless. For all these reasons, that rear rack never comes off. The handlebar bag, by the way, is actually a fanny pack that came with a fitted water bag that has loop fasteners on the bottom with side-mount tension straps. This allows me to hang the pack upside down from the bars without fuss, where all the things that were on my back go now.
