2021 Northern California Pashnit Motorcycle Tour
This 3-Day Pashnit Motorcycle Tour was retired.
As in, we’d done it so many times, it seemed time to let it rest for a few years. Most motorcycle tours I design have a shelf life of about 3-5 years. That means we do them several times, and then I work on designing something else. Different roads, explore a different region of the state, just something new. My motorcycle tours are 95%+ repeat business, mostly local riders on local roads, so after a few years the guys want something new. After almost 20 years, I’ve designed nearly 40 different multi-day motorcycle tours in California, Nevada & Oregon.
The all-new
Sequoia Motorcycle Tour I posted up a few days ago on the Pashnit Tours website set for April 2022 is the 39th motorcycle tour I’ve designed. Stuff sells out quick, and I had 10 riders sign up for this new ride before I even posted it on FB.
Someday, these routes should probably be in a book. We’ll call it 22 2-day Motorcycle Tours. Once I get up to 40+ routes I’ve designed, that’ll be Volume II. Something like that. That way, you can ride all these tours we’ve been doing all these years for yourself and see what we see. Northern California was the first tour we ever did, way back in 2004. Yup, that's 18 years ago. In the early years, we even did this NorCal ride twice a year, it’s that good. It’s the perfect motorcycle ride, if there is such a thing.
We even did the NorCal ride as early as March for several years, but we kept getting snowed on.
Riding
Highway 36 in March 2008
One year, we rode through six inches of snow on
Mattole Rd in March when the snow line dropped to 2400 feet. That was probably pushing the guys a little too much. In 2006, we did it early in the year and got snowed on again while all the hills along the ocean like Bolinas Ridge were bathed in a brilliant green from winter rains. It wasn’t until 2012 that I finally gave up on the NoCal Ride in March, and we instead planned this route for August, later in the ride season to compensate for the hot temps inland by being along the ocean in the hottest part of summer.
Snowstorm in March along
Mattole Rd in the Northern Coast Range
We made it over the pass just fine that day and dropped out of the snowline. I was just caught off-guard, the snowline dropped to 2400 feet which is pretty low.
I retired this tour in 2018 and designed a brand-new tour of the Eastern Sierra Nevada range for the 2018 & 2019 ride season. Then in 2020, I designed another new ride into the
Yuba Pass region through La Porte and Oroville Quincy Highway. Sadly, by the time the tour date came near, that region was experiencing a very large wildfire in between Oroville-Quincy Hwy and La Porte Rd.
My planned roads were inaccessible. Days before the ride with our planned route not available, I swapped the tour to the other side of the state and the Northern Coast Tour was suddenly added back to the roster inadvertently due to the 2020 fire season.
Why ride the same motorcycle tour over and over, doesn’t that get kind of old?
