Looking for a bit of a challenge? Especially, if you’re on something bigger than a 250 dirt bike? Take a stab at Heart Attack Hill. More formerly known as the Pinyon Drop off this ride takes you though the varied desert and canyon scenery of Anza-Borrego with enough obstacles to make the day’s outing interesting.

It’s not a big ride, but if you’re in the Anza-Borrego area and fancy a big-tralie friendly side trip, the Calcite Mine Road may be your cup of tea. As a one of the most accessible rides in the area, the Calcite Mine Road offers some of the most representative scenery and geology in this patch of California.

The UTBDR is an 871 mile off-road route that starts in Mexican Hat and runs north across the state of Utah to the Idaho border near Bear Lake. The UTBDR passes through a number of iconic locations including Moab, Valley of the Gods, the Abajo and La Sal Mountain Ranges, Nine Mile Canyon and the northern Wasatch Mountains.

Joe & Flora of Curbsyde Productions were at the Shelton Valley Dual-Sport & Adventure ride in Washington hosted by The Puget Sound Enduro Riders and supported by Touratech-USA. Amazing riding and scenery made this a “not to be missed” motorcycle event for 2011.

BMW’s R1200GS Adventure is the gold standard in adventure touring bikes, but now it’s facing down challengers like the Ducati Multistrada 1200 S Touring. Is the road to ruins for the BMW paved by the likes of the Ducati? Join OneWheelDrive.Net as we conduct a we conduct a monumental comparison against a back drop of dead seas, dying towns, a makeshift community on an abandoned military base and 800 year-old cliff dwellings from the end of the Sinagua people, all on “The Road to Ruins”.

Slab City, “turn on, tune in, drop out”, this is a place to get at least one of those right. Gaining its appellation from the concrete slabs remaining from the flattened and abandoned WWII Marine Barracks Camp Dunlap, the slabs play host to hippies in shanty-town shacks, octogenarians RVs and hermits with a social life. But, the most notable resident is a man building a technicolor dream mountain.

After hefting the Honda Varaderos through the Baja, I came to a conclusion – I hate big bikes in sand. Of course, taking the back way out of Slab City is what you’d expect of a desert; sand and deep sand at that. The surprise? Perhaps, we’ve been too quick in dubbing Ducati’s Multistrada 1200 S Touring “the Princess”.

We’re in a bar, because if you’re going to kick off a series called “Road to Ruins” it needs to start in a bar. A properly seedy bar, one in a town where dreams haven’t just been dashed or faded, they’ve been bludgeoned to death and their corpses dissolved in a toxic stew.

72 Hours, 3 days; waiting in anticipation it can seem an eternity, but three days to ride from Vancouver to Los Angeles? That can seem all too brief. And the deadline? The will call at the Wiltern for a sold out concert of Florence and the Machine. Conspiring against me the scheduling deities are cramming the ride with a border crossing, two business meetings, and pesky biological needs; eating, sleeping and washroom all taking time from a 2,048 kilometer direct route. So, it’s Neil and the Machine, a R1200GS Adventure, versus Florence and the Machine.

“We’re going to get wet.” That’s pretty much Glenn’s end statement on the matter as we look down the Richardson Highway from Gakona and into a black wall of cloud veiling the mountains in the distance and Valdez, AK beyond.

Can you really go wrong with a morning that starts in a yurt? Especially if the evening before was 100% boiled goat testicle free and featured a nice red wine rather than fermented yak milk? The yurt at Carlos Creek Campground in Denali is a long ways from roughing it in Mongolia and is more Ikea does yurt…

Will the marine layer ever relent?
Into Crescent City the “jumps” have been lengthened to the 1098S’ maximum safe range, 120 miles, out of necessity.  In response, my body is betraying me.    That’s making it …

I’ve made navigational errors before, tons of them, but this one feels profound.  The fog is so dense I can hardly make out the cat’s eye reflectors on the road in the 1098S’s projectors and …

L.A. … The 1098S slices northwards on the 405 out of Irvine between columns of traffic trudging forwards like workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.  Even with the Ventura luggage, I’m the widest thing on the …

“They took my Allen keys from my at security,” on the phone photographer Kevin Miklossy sounds disgusted, “you need a 6mm and a 3mm.  Does the Ducati toolkit have them?”
I laugh, “You’re joking right.”
The 1098S …

Sitting long, low and sepia-lit in the evening sun at Alice’s on Skyline Road the 1098S projects sensuality and anticipation of acceleration so pure it borders on erotic; needing only to shed vestigial street fitments …

It is September 2003, and the chugging of my new VTEC VFR’s ABS, normally so subtle and elegant as to be unnoticed in all but the direst of conditions, gives me notice that we have …

130 mph is indicated on the speedo as the bikes shoot arrow-straight across Death Valley’s floor. The road may be linear in direction but the warning signs of dips are not to be disregarded. …