In the photo I provided above, you can see I installed Ergon grips on the ends of the trekking bars and wrapped the sides with bar tape. It seemed great when I rode shorter shakedown distances. When I made a longer trip with them (around Lake Ontario), I was getting numbness along the outside of the pinkie finger and heels of both hands after a few long days.

I came to the conclusion the trekking bars, at least the way I had them set up, had no more hand positions than flat MTB bars with bar ends. Not bad, but not as many options as I had with my dropped bars.

I had purchased inexpensive trekking bars. I don't remember if I got them from Nashbar, but it would have been something like that. I found them more "flexy" with a full load than my Nitto dropped bars. It's not surprising. The trekking bars have a more narrow cross section, are wider, and have lots more total length wrapped around to the point where I normally grasped them. They also lacked the stiffening sleeve my Nitto bars have at the stem attachment point.

It's also nearly impossible to mount a decent rear-view mirror on the trekking bars.

I didn't hate the trekking bars or anything. I have lots of spare bike parts and I'm always changing things around anyway. I just wasn't as enamored with the trekking bars as I thought I would be.