
So I suppose this is how it started - a 100-mile overnighter along the Clutha River in New Zealand. I already have an Inbred 29er for bikepacking/XC duties but my partner had to borrow that rather lovely and otherwise barely-used Yeti ARC she's riding in the picture, so I've decided to build up a bike for her birthday (annoyingly the ARC got sold for a decent price, which I would've happily paid for it... but it's not the best bike for touring anyway... or is that just sour grapes).
Anyway, I was about to buy another Inbred, but I spotted this Specialized Hardrock Ultra at my local anarcho-hippy community bicycle workshop (everyone should have one of these, perfect for finding retro bits)... it's got a cromo fork and presumably a cromo frame under those stickers, and it's the right size, so I've gone for it - the best bit is that everything there is free, so long as you help someone else fix their bike/donate parts/donate beer. I suppose if she gets into mountain-biking, then this can get relegated to commuting duties, but for gentle XC and riverside/rail-trail/dirt road rides it'll be just the ticket.
So here it is, looking a bit shabby and covered in anarcho-hippy stickers, but the rust is entirely cosmetic. I noticed it has those weird 'used to be a horizontal dropout but marketing didn't like it so we filled a bit of it in' dropouts - so I took a hacksaw to the additional metal to turn them back into horizontals, foreseeing that it'll be a singlespeed at some point.

Does anyone know what year it is, what size seatpost it takes (looks like 26.8 but I didn't have a vernier gauge with me), and what the tyre clearance is like?