I flew out to Los Angeles to ride a motorcycle this past winter, for the first time in five years—and it was glorious.
Work used to bring me out to LA two or three times a year; I’d get out of bed early in the morning, 3:30 AM at the latest, then drive through moose country for 45 minutes to get to the airport. Connection to the LAX run was always Toronto or Montreal; I preferred Toronto, because the US Customs line was always backed up in Montreal. Get through the queue, run to the gate toting a helmet and wearing riding gear and boots. No checked luggage; I didn’t trust the airline to deliver it in time. Land at LAX, pickup by a car service, head out to a nearby hotel, dinner. I’d get to bed around 9 PM.
Overlooking the Mulholland Highway from the Malibu Hills, somewhere around Topanga. All readily accessible from the city of Los Angeles, and very good riding as long as you dodge traffic. Photo: Petr Basel/Shutterstock.com
Taking the time zone change into account, I’d be getting to sleep about 24 hours after I’d left home that morning. No wonder I was always groggy for the next day’s ride. But despite the mental fog, I was always amazed at the roads in California, with cliffside riding and canyon carving only a few minutes away from busy cities. All through the COVID lockdowns I thought to myself, I need to go back to ride the area on my own schedule. I appreciated the all-expenses-paid fun of the press launches, but the schedule meant there were people and places I wanted to see, and couldn’t. So last winter, ahead of AIMExpo, I put together my own trip. I flew to LAX, picked up a loaner Transalp in Long Beach, and after an evening with family near Westwood, headed north on the PCH to meet up with co-worker Marty. Marty gave me some tips for back roads to take north towards Mulholland, and we met up at the Rock Store.
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- Photos from various LA rides over the years. Here, some Softail, from a launch back in 2018. The amount of pre-scouting that went into that ride must have been intense, because we were probably never more than 90 minutes from LA, and the riding was non-stop fun. Photo: Zac Kurylyk
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- An Aprilia Shiver, up on Route 33, just north of Ojai. A couple of hours’ ride from LA, with miles and miles of empty canyon road for the happy sport biker. Photo: Zac Kurylyk
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- I think Alfonse Palaima grabbed this smartphone snap for me, or maybe a Harley-Davidson employee. Although the Heritage wasn’t the fastest bike through the twisties, the ride to Big Bear and Lake Arrowhead on this launch was so good that to this day, I consider it the best street-based launch I was ever on.
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- At the Dan Behar Memorial in the Santa Monicas this past winter. The street riding in this area is incredibly close to the urban sprawl of LA. No other North American major urban center can compare to this area once you factor in variety of scenery and weather. Photo: Zac Kurylyk
At this point LA-based readers might see this as pretty blasé. On a warm Saturday, with roads clogged with slow-moving cruisers and weekenders in convertibles, maybe they’d be right. But this was a cool day, the Rock Store parking lot practically empty. Marty and I had the Santa Monicas to ourselves, for some of the best street riding I’d had in years. Some of the best riding I’d had since the last time I was in LA. And it was all within a few minutes of the city. Those jaded Angelenos don’t know how good they have it.
Los Angeles has terrible traffic, but a motorcycle can cut through it quickly enough and get you to the good roads outside the urban sprawl quickly. Photo: blvdone/Shutterstock.com
Yes, if you’re in LA, freeway congestion is terrible, but at least you can lane-split and take advantage of the HOV lane to cross town quickly. No matter what corner of the city you’re in, you should be able to find good street riding within 40 minutes, as long as you time everything correctly. To the west, you’ve got the Santa Monicas. To the northeast, the San Gabriel Canyon Road and Angeles Crest. To the southeast, Ortega Highway.
These are only a few of the roads I’m familiar with as a clueless outsider, and yeah, I know they get busy, but I also know you can plan around the traffic and have fun that’s practically unthinkable near most major North American cities. Live in Chicago? Miami? Dallas? Boston? New York? Toronto? You’d have to travel for hours to find anything as good as the riding near Los Angeles.
Angeles Crest Highway is lots of fun as long as you time it correctly, That’s the general rule close-by the city. You’ll have to dodge a lot of cars on a pleasant-weathered weekend, so plan your rides around that. Photo: Wirestock Creators
Or if you do have good roads nearby, you don’t have the weather that LA has, and you probably don’t have the diversity. Los Angeles has ocean scenery, deserts, mountains, even farmland all nearby, once you get out of town. Get up early, and you can make it to Rossi’s Driveway and back in a day, dragging pegs as you head north and ending the day with a relaxed cruise along the Pacific on the way home. Or you take your ADV to the Mojave or Joshua Tree for some desert riding and camping. Or you can pack up and head south to Mexico for some real adventure—Ensenada is only three-and-a-half hours from Long Beach.
No wonder North America’s motorcycle magazine business has based itself in LA for years.
Ironically, my own mid-winter trip to Los Angeles was nuked by a mid-winter atmospheric river storm; I got out of town barely ahead of the downpour. Except for an overnight sprinkling in Victorville, I never saw a drop until I got to Las Vegas a few days later. Was that good luck or bad? I think it was the former, especially because now I have a reason to fly back next winter for another go.
Trail Break runs on the first Monday of every month, unless Zac forgets about it, or gets worked up about something in the days in-between scheduled columns …
