Pashnit Motorcycle Tours (2025)

25/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Sierra Nevada XI

Luc & I have been riding together on Pashnit Tours since 2011 – nearly 15 years.
And I’ve been hearing about his garage for the entire time. One time Luc showed me a photo of his home office, which was filled with motorcycle tires.
For his 9 bikes in the garage.
Next to his Viper. (last time your saw a Viper? Yeah, me neither) Next to the Porsche.
Which is next to the Mustang.
15 years I’ve been hearing about these bikes. If you follow these posts, Luc is the guy right behind me in all the photos. Have you ever noticed it’s always a different bike? Luc rides every motorcycle tour I offer all season long- but on a different bike each tour. He rotates down the line of 9 bikes.
So when he invited the Pashnit Tour group over to his house for dinner – the group was riding right by home base – that meant I finally got to see the garage. Sure enough, nine bikes...!

24/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Sierra Nevada X

Highway 108-Sonora Pass is one of my favorite mountain roads, which isn’t saying much as I think all of them are my favorite. In my photos archives, there are over 1000 photos I’ve taken just of this 60-mile stretch of road spanning 25 years. Predictably so, I added another 50 shots while Dmitri & Luc argue over cornering techniques. Dmitri was a Total Control instructor and Luc owned a track day school. Their respective viewpoints may clash; Dmitri and I are devout aficionados of what we sport-touring riders call Delayed Late Apex technique or more colloquially, Outside-In. Luc being of the trackday mindset always favors Racer Line.
https://www.pashnit.com/ca-highway-108

20/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Sierra Nevada VIII

Have an assignment for you: Whenever you’re in the tiny town of Walker in the Eastern Sierra Range, stop by Mountain View Barbecue along Highway 395 & have lunch. Not only is this a great place for lunch, the proprietor Jeff has been there serving up good eats for 31 years.
First time we came here with a group was 2008, fast forward 17 years and there’s Jeff standing there as we pull up. Jeff, I’ve got another group for you. He remembers us.
Across the street is the West Walker Motel, a 1940s-style motor-lodge where you pull your bike right up to your front door, and every room had a theme. There used to be two little ole ladies that ran this place. Our tour groups would arrive and they'd walk out and hand the riders a beer. True story.

19/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Sierra Nevada VII

If you connect Ebbetts Pass with Sonora Pass, you get to ride Monitor Pass.
And that’s a very good thing. Highway 98-Monitor Pass is an enjoyable ride up and over a 8300-foot mountain pass that’s stunningly scenic with broad open views across the Sierra Nevada Range.
At the summit, you can clearly see a fire lookout atop Leviathan Peak (I wonder what’s up there) and broad open views of Slinkard’s Valley. Monitor was once a mining camp nearby. It was named in 1863 after the Civil War ironclad Monitor fought the Merrimac at the start of the Civil War in 1862. Monitor Creek and Monitor Pass retain the name dating back to the original mining camp.
Mark always comes to me as we approach this pass, do you mind if I lead, he asks with a knowing grin.
It’s all you I reply, take the lead.

05/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Southern California X

June Lake is known as the Switzerland of California.
If you’ve never ridden the June Lake Loop, that likely makes no sense to you. But take my well-traveled word for it. It’s a very unique spot on the West Coast and one of the many easily-missed scenic rides in the state.
You’d never know this place was here, there’s no clue this loop even exists if you’re zipping up and down Highway 395. Take the less traveled path – or just read my article on this place. Surrounded in mountain peaks and a series of glacial mountain lakes, the tiny mountain town of June Lake is worth the detour off the main highway. The scenery throughout this 16-mile loop is stunning riding into a horseshoe-shaped mountain valley and looping around four crystal clear lakes of Grant, Silver, Gull and June, often riding right along the very edge of the water in several places. Four more mountain lakes can also be reached along this ride via short hikes to Parker, Fern, Agnew and Gem Lakes.
Not a place to go fast, lean it deeper, or be in a hurry, the June Lake Loop is for riders who want to add mileage to their journey rather than cut the journey shorter.
https://www.pashnit.com/ca-june-lake-loop

04/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Southern California VIII

First discovered Manzanar National Historic Site in 2005, by pure coincidence, mere months after it was opened up to the public. The site is between Lone Pine & Independence in the Eastern Sierra Range and I’ve wanted to check out the continued improvements. We don’t use the term Internment Camp, ‘internment’ refers specifically to the detention of non-citizens, we use the softer term of Relocation Center.
But, these were in effect prison camps—surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers, holding upwards of 10,000 US citizens during the war years of the 1940s. When WWII ended, the city of Los Angeles owned the land Manzanar was built on & ordered the 10,000 person camp be erased and the land returned to its condition prior to the war. They were only partly successful and subsequent generations have realized the teaching value of our US history, however blightful it may have been to make you and I aware of these camps.
Manzanar wasn’t the only camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII. Military planners hastily constructed 10 camps in 6 states spanning California, Wyoming, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and as far east as Arkansas. Canada also imprisoned their Japanese-Canadians during WWII.
Manzanar is the only camp in the United States that is being preserved by the National Park Service and is very slowly being restored & portions rebuilt to the way it was in 1945. Every other WWII-era Relocation Camp for Japanese-Americans in the United States has been erased from our history, except Manzanar.
In the far northwestern corner are 1940s-era Japanese gardens that have been re-discovered, preserved by the desert sands that reclaimed the gardens built by internees who were landscapers and gardeners in their former lives prior to WWII.
What appear to be teams of volunteers have taken it upon themselves to restore the Japanese gardens to the way they looked in 1945. I’ve brought so many tour groups to Manzanar through the years, all my alumni have been here several times over. If you are ever in the Eastern Sierra Range near Lone Pine, Manzanar is an absolute required stopping point in your journey.
Never heard of this place, read this:
https://www.pashnit.com/manzanar-war-relocation-center

03/06/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Southern California VII

I post about a 1000 photos per month to my Flickr account. There are about 64,000 pics on my Flickr, and 99.9% are taken on Pashnit Tours.
But one of the Pashnit Tours Alumni pointed out something interesting on the last ride. I’ve noticed that 30%, are you solo- riding to different places, he said. I always watch your last-day-photos to see where you go on the solo ride back to home base, he added. Never much thought of that to be honest. But he was right. The solo ride back to home base is always all-day-awesome. Yes, I could take the freeway and zippity home, but where is the fun in that- and the mere thought is agonizing.
Today, the plan was a 650-mile-12-hour ride from Southern California to NorCal via the long way and stopping at as many new places as I could along Highway 395 riding the base of the Eastern Sierra Range. The timing has to be perfect though, as I told my wife I’d be home at 4-ish and I’m 650 miles away. Doing some quick mental motorcycle math meant getting on the road at 4am to escape Los Angeles before anyone else was up and traversing the freeway(s) out of the city to get into the open desert at sunrise. I’ve heard of Randsburg, population 80, a living ghost town atop a 3600 ft mountain, but never stopped there. Till today.

14/05/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Shasta Coast VI

The original forecast was for rain. But when we checked the satellite in the morning, the front had passed over us during the night. Score. But we still had to get through the backside of the front which meant riding into the low clouds above, up and over the 4900 ft Gazelle Summit. This region burned in a 2022 wildfire, but the low pass over Gazelle Summit is just as twisty as always with broad expansive views from the summit and a fast steady downward descent to Callahan. We skipped a road we call ‘The Racetrack’, a stretch of road from Callahan to Cecilville. You have to ride it to understand why we call it that. We’ll be back to ride it. And the skip was exchanged for riding through Quartz Valley to reach Scott River Rd adhering to the contours of the Scott River. The river is riding high and filling the canyon with the sounds of spring snowmelt from the Marble Mountains. Scott River Rd is the perfect shortcut, 25 miles of canyon twisties and narrowing to single lane. We didn’t see anyone else on this road.

12/05/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Shasta Coast IV

The dry run for this all-new motorcycle tour was one year ago.
My goal was to reach the Jot Dean Ice Cave, but that attempt was thwarted by snow just a few miles up the main road as the ice cave is above 5000 ft and lots of snow last year. Could we make the cave if we rode to it later in the spring snow melt? I moved the tour to a full month later in the ride season to allow for more snow melt. There’s no way to look this stuff up where the snow line is. You just have to go. Could we have two winters in a row in Northern California with lots of rain & snow in the mountains?
The only clue was Lake Shasta in Northern California; the largest man-made lake in the state at 30,000 acres, 1.5 trillion gallons of stored water and 365 miles of shoreline is completely full, currently at 96% of its total capacity.
Remember those doomsday pics of empty NorCal reservoirs a few years ago? Yeah, No. Everything is now completely full in NorCal a few years later.
Which is great, but ice cave...
The Jot Dean Ice Cave is located 22 miles north of Highway 89 along Medicine Lake Rd. Medicine Lake Rd is the southern entrance to Lava Beds National Monument on the California-Oregon border. It’s a national monument no one has heard of. There a tiny sign along Medicine Lake Rd, that’s it. The opening to the lava tube is just yards off the road. You park along Medicine Lake Rd and walk a few feet to this giant hole in the ground. No stairs, no path, you have to climb down huge volcanic boulders of rock into the lava tube which descends at a steep 30-45 degree angle into the ground. At the bottom, is ice. It’s the coolest thing ever. Impressive ice formations, including long, thick icicles hanging from the ceiling like stalactites, some even connecting with the ice pool on the floor. Small, bulbous ice forms rise from the ground, resembling ice stalagmites. It can be 90 degrees at the surface, and down here (within sight of the surface) ice. I’ve repeatedly read how this works, hot air rises, cool air sinks, the air above creates insulation to allow the ice to form. It still makes no sense, and it’s fascinating.
Of all the trips I’ve made to Glass Mountain (literally a mountain of obsidian rock) near the Oregon border over the last few decades, including with tour groups in tow, I rode right past the ice cave for years. My first ride to Glass Mountain was 30 years ago on my FJ1200, and never knew the ice cave was there.
What no sign will tell you is this ice cave sits at an elevation of 5,420 feet.
And it’s May. And there was a lot of snow in NorCal this last winter.
We made it 20 miles deep into the Medicine Lake Highlands Volcanic Area to within 2 miles from the ice cave and blocked by snow. Nuts.
I’ll be back.

09/05/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Shasta Coast III

Bullets. Booze. Lotto. Beer.
We love rural Northern California.
Where else would you see a sign advertising that. Only thing missing on the sign was ‘Divorce’. Oh, and it’s a gas station, the Sportsman's Mini-Mart in Fall River Mills.
Next time I need some booze, a lotto ticket, and some bullets, I know where to go.
At least this is your place if you’re a sportsman. And if do go, don’t miss Cassel Fall River Mills Rd. Paved a few seasons ago, it’s a curvaceous blast into the underbelly of Fall River Mills, all the while, the snow capped 8515 ft volcanic peak of Mount Lassen looms in the mirrors.

07/05/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours – Shasta Coast II

The dry run for this all-new motorcycle tour was one year ago.
The goal was to ride to Burney Falls, a spectacular waterfall in Northern California. But it was closed for renovation for several years. This is a good thing. Few years back, we rode here and were stuck in a long line of traffic on Highway 89 attempting to just get into the park. The wait was so long, we turned around and left. It's been a few years since we've been back. Maybe the new improvements would make it better? This visit, we rode right into the park, zero issues.
Burney Falls in Northern California has been called the 'Eighth Wonder of the World' - but that makes no sense unless you go see it in person. The falls are 129 feet high, but nearly twice as wide.
But more interesting, this massive waterfall isn't fed by a river, rather 100 million gallons per day is flowing out of the rock face. This waterfall is fed by underground springs from a volcanic aquifer. The surrounding landscape is volcanic, part of the Southern Cascade Range. The porous lava rock allows for the aquifer system that feeds the falls. During the heat of summer, the river disappears underground, but the water continues to flow out of the rock face.
https://www.pashnittours.com/shasta-coast

06/05/2025

Pashnit Motorcycle Tours - Shasta Coast I

If all you ever do in the Red Bluff & Redding region of Northern California is ride the western side of I-5 (which splits the state in half), you’re missing out. There’s a whole list of twisty backroads that parallel I-5 that no one has ever heard of.
What if we connected them all together to enjoy an early-morning 70-mile ride with Mount Lassen to the west, and the 14,000 ft peak of Mount Shasta to the north.
Jellys Ferry Rd > Ash Creek Rd > Dersch Rd > Highway 44 > Inwood Rd > Ponderosa Way > East Fern Rd > Oak Run to Fern Rd > Phillips Rd
Recognize any of that? No? Give a try someday.
Super fun deserted foothill ride through rolling terrain with zero people and endless twisty roads. It's still spring in Northern California and it's perfect cool temps and everything is still green.
The perfect way to start a tour route.

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