TL;DR - I recommend running front suspension with as little pre-load as possible. Having removed about a third of the pre-load from my ADS setup for this trip, the ride was much better and the suspension felt like it was able to work in situations where it was previously hitting full-droop.
On the Utah trip (as well as Anza-Borrego), I'd noticed that my new front suspension from ADS didn't seem quite right. When I'd go over the back side of a bump and the wheel had to travel down to meet the lower ground, I was frequently getting a "clunk" sound that I'd previously not heard (with the Toytec BOSS setup). On talking to Monte @Blackdawg (who got the same setup a few months after I did), he mentioned that he too heard the clunk now sometimes - but not nearly as much as I was hearing it.
The only difference as far as I could tell was that he'd removed some pre-load from his springs.
Keen to stop the bump and get a bit smoother ride, I took the opportunity to use the Branick spring compressor to remove approximately one-third of the pre-load from my coilovers (about ¾" of front lift). Needless to say it was satisfying to be able to turn the collar on the shock body without any punch or pry bar, all of the spring tension held in check by the compressor.
And, removing that tension seems to have fixed most of the clunking I was hearing. Where previously I got on the order of 10-15 clunks/day even when I was being careful, on this trip I was less careful and still got no more than 1 clunk each day.
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