A long time ago, on my first trip to the Baja Peninsula, I ran across a guy. He was a few decades older than me, leaning out of the window of a pickup with a dirt bike in the back. Big grin on his face. “Hey, when you get back across the border, tell everyone you got robbed. We gotta keep this place uncrowded! Yewww!!!!”
He was joking, mostly.
Since that first trip to Baja, I’ve chased dirt across Africa, Central Asia, and most of Europe, all for one feeling: riding a motorcycle through an unknown, incredible landscape that feels a long way from home. Baja hands you that feeling without the difficulty or expense of getting halfway around the world.
You drive across the border, or park at the border and ride across, and within hours, you’re somewhere that feels like the other side of the planet. For anyone living in the Western U.S., I don’t think there’s a better place to ride a motorcycle.
What Makes Baja Worth the Ride
Diverse Terrain
The peninsula has it all. In a single day, you’ll ride a hard-packed sand beach where the tide decides your line, and then you can drop into an arroyo — a dry wash cut into the desert by water that hasn’t run in months — walled in on both sides, and often the only way out is through. Then you might climb into an actual pine forest in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, which stops people cold who thought the whole peninsula was cactus and rock.
You’ll cross dry lake beds so flat and hard they’d make land speed racers weep with joy, and drop into low points full of ultrafine, air-filter–choking champagne dust or stumble upon proper sand dunes along the Pacific Ocean. Some sections are flowy, fast single track that reward momentum.
Others are the blown-out remains of a SCORE (think Baja 1000) race course, chewed by race trucks into giant whoops. Then there’s the techy stuff: rock gardens and ledges where picking your line is everything. You can do it all in a few hours of riding, or build a route around what you like best.
The most fun I’ve had in my life is riding down sections of fast two-track with natural berms and jumps. It feels like a video game. Riding right on the edge with your best friends by your side.
The Rhythm Rewards Patience
A lot of what I know comes from a mentor that my crew calls Baja Brad. He’s been an unreasonable amount of help over the last few years, from single-track lines I didn’t know existed to where to sleep, where to eat, who to call to shuttle bikes, and where to safely leave a truck.
The rest is map time: advice from friends, forums, and YouTube; the names of places riders mention; and then hours in satellite view and old Baja maps, stitching lines together.
The Upper Peninsula used to be a lot more wild and open, but in the last few years, we’ve seen way more locked fences running both directions off the road, so trucking our bikes south has become the move.
This past May, we ran a loop out of El Rosario, across toward Catavina and Bay of LA, down to Santa Rosalita, and back. Six days, averaging around 107 miles and just under 7 hours in the saddle each day. The mileage stayed modest, rarely topping 130, but the days were long.
That ratio of saddle time versus trip length is key. Contrast it with the short-weekend trips I’ve done, parking at Tecate and ripping a nearly 500-mile loop in 2 days, just to scratch the itch. This was slower, more technical, more deliberate, and far better for it.
This trip was also remote in a way that definitely changes how you ride. Unless we happened to cross a highway, we only saw one or two other vehicles and no other motorcycles all week. When you’re on a 70-mile section of single track that isn’t close to anything except where it starts and where it ends, you have to trust your equipment and your crew completely.
You have to dial your riding back a notch from how you’d ride close to home, because a crash you’d shake off 20 minutes from your truck is a different problem when the nearest help is dozens of miles of dirt away.
The Crew Is the Trip
The single most important decision you make about a Baja trip — maybe even more important than your bike — is who you choose to bring with you. Years ago, my friend Andy, who co-planned my biggest cross-continental trips, coined a phrase that sums up the kind of expeditions we chase: do hard things with easy people.
Deep in the backcountry, you need people who can laugh through the worst of it and stay calm when things don’t go to plan. I’ve made plenty of mistakes learning who those people aren’t: a rider who had one too many beers at every stop, and a trip where I assumed too much about someone’s skill and he assumed too little about the terrain.
Those lessons add up to a few hard rules: mandatory gear is mandatory, honesty about skill and fitness is mandatory, and keep the group small.
This past May, the crew was the least of my worries. Josh and Marlin (you’ve been enjoying a lot of both of their photos while reading this) have both ridden across continents with me, more than once, and there’s not a problem the three of us haven’t found a way through.
My friend Stew has raced motocross at the national level; he and I cut our teeth building a business together and spent years mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.
Matt and I met talking motos in a parking lot, and we haven’t been to Baja without each other in 5 years. He’s my first call when I’ve got a weird issue with my bike, and he’s got a hilarious story about nearly every topic. And me, I’m easily the least talented rider in the group, which is on purpose — it’s good to have wildly competent friends.
There’s a flow that shows up when you ride with people like that, when you’re not wondering whether someone cleared a section or whether the pace is right. This group rips, and the ride becomes like a dream.
About the Reputation
Baja has a reputation for being a little wild, and so does Mexico, in general. The stakes down here are not those of a weekend trip in the U.S., and things can go sideways in this world. I don’t take that lightly, and you shouldn’t either. But in a decade of trips through this peninsula, I’ve had exactly one experience that lived up to Baja’s slightly fearsome reputation.
A road we were on ran 50 feet through someone’s property. We stopped to greet a kind older gentleman, and a minute later, a younger man, drunk and angry, came out demanding payment. We offered a little less than his number, and he came back with a rifle. Negotiation over. We paid what he asked, which was ultimately a small amount. The lesson: De-escalation beats principle every time.
One story, out of 10 years. The off-road culture down here is long and rich, and the people I’ve met have been kind, curious, and generous almost without exception. The gas-station guy, the motel owner, the woman running the restaurant.
In every town, someone knows someone with a truck. Build yourself a network through kindness and banter, and you’ve created a margin of safety you can call on when things truly go wrong. Respect the reputation, but don’t let it keep you home.
The People Are the Magic
My relationship with Baja leans less toward a full-on expedition and more toward a motorcycle vacation that includes the best riding of my life, followed by an incredible meal every night. Camping in Baja is a blast, but with how cheap everything is down there, I’d rather run a light bike, plan my route around where I’ll sleep, fuel, and eat, and stay in one of the great little motels run by locals, and eat great food.
What you end up remembering just as much as the terrain is the unbelievable fish taco at a roadside stand in a settlement of 40 people and the family that runs the only motel for 80 miles, or the cook who keeps the kitchen open just for you, because you rolled in late, dusty, and grateful.
The Logistics
Show Up in Shape
This kind of riding doesn’t reward couch potatoes. Fitness is the one thing you can’t buy, and having a body that’s strong enough to take a fall and shake it off is worth having. Still, nothing replaces seat time for building the muscle endurance you’ll need.
You’ll have far more fun if you show up prepared for a demanding week of riding rather than grinding through it fresh off the couch. If you’re prepared, the last miles you ride before hitting the motel will be (almost) as fun as the first miles of the morning. Come unprepared, and they’re a suffer-fest to the end.
The Truck and the Staging Point
On our last couple of trips, we left our truck at Mama Espinosa’s in El Rosario, rode South, and came back to it. It’s a legendary staging point and a natural first-night stop, turning the whole trip into one clean loop with no vehicle to babysit.
Getting five motos and five guys down there took my trusty diesel 2014 Ram 2500. I topped off the tank before crossing the border and added Diesel Kleen fuel additive every time I fueled up in Mexico, as a little insurance policy against getting bad fuel, which isn’t uncommon in the rural parts of Mexico.
Five guys in the cab, three bikes in the bed, and hitch racks covered the rest. A jack rack in my front hitch gave me the approach-angle clearance I needed for one bike, and a 1UP USA Moto Rack carried another off the back.
While the 1UP rack was solid, if I’m honest, I’d rather have run a Loowit Lift, which is easier to load a bike onto (thanks to being powered) and wouldn’t have required two people to wrestle the heavy 1UP rack on and off every time we loaded bikes into the bed.
The Border, Coming and Going
Three pieces of paperwork are essential any time you cross the border into Baja. The first is travel insurance (I use World Nomads), and the second is bike insurance (I use Baja Bound). Your normal motorcycle insurance policy probably won’t cover you on the peninsula, so double-check before you leave.
Lastly, you must carry your bike’s active registration, not the title. Riding across the border, we’ve never been checked. When we drive bikes across in the truck, we typically are.
This past trip in May put that rule to the test. We had two press bikes (aka motorcycles loaned to us by the manufacturer for testing) with no registration, just a stack of Yamaha documentation. Unfortunately, we drew a border agent who was having a bad day and wanted us to have one, too.
The move here is to always stay friendly, stay respectful, and keep the conversation going until a path forward opens up. Sometimes, if you’re lucky (and charming), “Go back to your own country,” becomes, “Welcome, have a safe trip,” even if it takes an hour of work on the Starlink in a holding area in between to get it done.
When you come home, you have more options. On the bike, you can lane-split to the front of the line, which works, but annoys every car you pass. In the truck, a SENTRI card or Global Entry with your vehicle registered to your account makes it pretty painless. The border at Tecate is almost always less crowded than the one at Tijuana, and we’ve historically parked on the U.S. side of Tecate and ridden across from there.
Money and Group Size
When it comes to money, bring more cash than you think you need, and don’t keep it all in one place or with one person. That way, if something happens, you’re not totally screwed. Use a card when you can, pay in pesos when you can, and treat USD as a generally accepted backup. Paying a gate fee to a random guy in the middle of Baja (especially if he’s drunk and armed) is simply easier in pesos, so start there.
On group size, stick to five or fewer. If you’re running one truck, that’s the number where riders and bikes still fit, assuming you have a front hitch option. It works for lodging, too, since most places down there have three-person rooms.
What It Costs, or Let Someone Else Handle It
Our week this year, five of us and all fuel, lodging, food, and insurance came to just under $943 a person. That was on the high end for one of these trips because it was my birthday, so we didn’t camp, and we ate like kings. You can easily spend a week in Baja for less than half of that. And if the prep sounds like more than you want to take on, outfits like Ready to Ride Rentals and Wilderness Collective run guided, all-inclusive trips. You show up and ride.
I love being fully self-sufficient out there with no chase truck, but that’s a preference, not a requirement, and it is a lot to manage for a first timer. If renting or doing a guided trip lowers your particular bar to entry and gets you down to Baja sooner, then do it. There’s zero shame there.
You Might Fail Anyway
No matter how much prep you do, there’s never a 100% guarantee that your trip is going to be successful, because shit, as they say, happens. That’s Baja in a nutshell, as far as I’m concerned.
A trip I took last winter did not succeed, at least not the way we planned. We ran out of gas and decided to sleep in an arroyo. We had to keep a fire going all night as temps dropped into the 40s. It sucked at the time, but as is usually the case with these things, it makes for a good story over a beer. This year, we did succeed, mostly.
I say mostly because on the last day, my bike stopped shifting into sixth gear. We checked the engine oil filter and screens, but found no abnormal metal fragments. Next, we checked the shifter mechanism inside the clutch cover, but found nothing broken.
We still don’t know exactly what went wrong, except that it wasn’t going to be a fix-it-on-the-trail situation. I was still able to ride the bike in gears one through five, and every other part of the bike had been flawless all week, so it wasn’t a total loss. As you’ll see in the next part of this story, despite having a super-sorted, well-prepared bike, something I couldn’t control just broke.
Something is always going to break down here, and the tales you tell for the rest of your life are the ones about when things went sideways, not the miles that went smoothly. Walking that line where safety or success isn’t guaranteed is what makes it an adventure instead of just another ride.
It’s also what forges the bonds that come out of these trips. You don’t bond with your crew over the easy hours. You bond over the wash you slept in while trying not to freeze, and the gear that you just barely limped home with.
Generations in Catavina
My grandpa is 97, and he’s the baddest dude I know. The month before I was born, he was on a Baja trip, towing a fifth wheel to Cabo and back, keeping a log in a notebook of his daily miles and where he started and slept. He got bad gas once, limped into Catavina, pulled the truck’s carburetor, flushed the fuel system, and got back on the road.
Generations of Galaways have broken down in Catavina, and we keep coming back. Something about the peninsula just pulls us in, and that weird magic is part of what makes me want to share my experiences with you. Maybe you’ll get the Baja bug and your grandkids will tell stories about your trips and keep the whole glorious cycle going.
