Twin Cities Rd • Rancho Seco Nuclear Generating Station • Buena Vista Rd • South Comanche Parkway • Burson Rd • Milton Rd • East Sonora Rd • Knights Ferry Covered Bridge • Highway 120/108 • La Grange Rd • Red Hills Rd • Highway 49 • Jacksonville Rd • Algerine Rd • Wards Ferry Rd • Old Priest Grade • Highway 120 • Smith Station Rd • Highway 132 • Highway 49 - The Little Dragon • Bear Valley Rd • Hornitos • Hornitos Rd • Highway 140 • Triangle Rd • Oakhurst • Ben Hur Rd • Raymond Rd • Road 420 • Road 223 •  Crane Valley Rd • North Fork Rd • Oneal Rd • Friant • Millerton Rd • Morgan Canyon Rd • Auberry Rd • Tollhouse Rd • Burrough Valley Rd • Maxon Rd • Trimmer Springs Rd • Elwood Rd • Todd Eymann Rd • Highway 245

​

What does it take to plan a multi-day motorcycle tour?

Well first, it always starts with an idea. Secondly, considerable time spent staring at a map comes next, often working backward—figuring out where we want to end up at the end of the day, and then beginning to string roads together. After all, we're riders; we universally want the same thing: to ride twisty backroads the longest way possible to our destination.

If we connect this with that, and that with this, we can start to create a route that reveals our idea and builds on it.

 

Nuclear power gone wrong...

​

The Rancho Seco Nuclear Power Plant is viewable from a wide swath of the Sierra Foothills. Located south of Sacramento and built during the mid-1970s, it produced power for the Central Valley. By 1977, Rancho Seco was performing remarkably well, and during the first seven months of that year, it produced more energy than any other nuclear plant in the world. However, in March 1978, Rancho Seco experienced a steam generator dryout that triggered an automatic reactor shutdown, which was later deemed the third most serious safety-related occurrence in the United States. Interestingly, the accident at Rancho Seco happened one year prior to the Three Mile Island accident and involved a very similar Babcock & Wilcox reactor design.  

​

The Rancho Seco accident did not cause a meltdown, but it showed how a small equipment problem could turn into a much bigger issue. If the workers hadn't figured out what was happening and restored the cooling system, the reactor could have gotten so hot that the fuel inside would have melted. Luckily, they fixed the problem before that happened. However, the words "luck" and "nuclear power plant" likely shouldn't be in the same sentence.

What Rancho Seco taught the nuclear industry was important: bad information from instruments can be almost as dangerous as broken equipment. The operators thought the reactor was in better shape than it really was because some instruments were giving misleading readouts. The issues that caused the accident were also known design flaws in the reactor—two more words that shouldn't be in the same sentence.

A public vote closed the plant in 1989. All nuclear power-generating equipment was removed, but the twin 425-foot-high cooling towers remain. Leaving them in place was cheaper than destroying them, and the Cold War-era nuclear warning sirens remain to this day.

Riding right up to these massive structures finally puts them in perspective. They are huge. Rising 425 feet above the edge of the foothills, they kick off our journey.

​

The Narrow Band...

Our tour begins at the edge of the Sierra Nevada. The mountains loom in the distance, covered in snow this time of year. But here's the thing: California has an elevation band stretching 400 miles north to south. Stay below 4,000 feet, and you can ride your motorcycle year-round. Where we ride this time of year is all tied to elevation. This narrow corridor spans from sea level on the valley floor up to the 4,000-foot snow line, where foothill forests begin melding into the snow-capped peaks of the High Sierra.

What makes this narrow band unique is the type of roads it produces: creek-bed routes that fluidly follow the contours of rivers and canyons, with each river feeding into a mountain reservoir. Our tour begins here and weaves south.

Our route takes us past the Knights Ferry Covered Bridge. The bridge is a must-see historical landmark spanning 379 feet as the longest covered bridge west of the Mississippi River. Originating from an 1848 Gold Rush ferry established by Dr. William Knight, the site evolved into a vital river crossing where an open-truss wooden bridge was built in 1857, only to be washed away during the catastrophic Great Flood of 1862 when a neighboring bridge crashed into it. Undaunted, the Stanislaus Bridge and Ferry Company rebuilt the covered span eight feet higher in 1863, utilizing a low-maintenance Howe truss design preserved with linseed oil that accommodated everything from heavy timber loads to circus elephants. After serving local gold-seekers, flour mill operations, and early automobile traffic for well over a century, the bridge was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark, closed to vehicles in 1981, and is now preserved as a relaxed stop alongside the historic townsite and the Stanislaus River.

 

Don't peek over the edge...

 

Just up the hill from Knights Ferry is one of our favorite foothill rides—or perhaps just mine. Best ridden during our brief spring green and before the summer heat arrives, Wards Ferry Rd is another 1850s reminder of early attempts to cross rivers and gain access into the Sierra. Historians attribute its construction to early 1850s miners, teamsters, and private turnpike operators. The route began as a crude wagon trail and mule track pioneered by early prospectors.

In 1850, Joseph Ward established a hand-built log ferry across the Tuolumne River to connect the boomtowns of Sonora and Groveland. Private toll companies and local gold miners carved out the primitive wagon road to feed traffic down to Ward's ferry crossing at the bottom of a steep canyon. After Ward was murdered by bandits for his gold earnings in 1854 at what is now Murderer’s Gulch, private enterprise continued to maintain and widen the trail into a stagecoach route.

They stopped widening when they reached stagecoach width and everyone went home—which is where our story picks up.

Wards Ferry Rd delivers one of the most thrilling and nerve-wracking single-lane rides in the Sierra Foothills, carving a steep, uninterrupted 1,000-foot descent down a sheer canyon wall completely void of guardrails or shoulders. The route demands absolute focus as you burble through tight switchbacks overlooking dramatic drop-offs. The urge to peek over the edge is almost irresistible, but eyes front, trooper.

The descent is single-lane all the way to the canyon floor at Graffiti Bridge. Spanning a quiet finger of Don Pedro Reservoir where the Tuolumne River flows, this iconic, spray-painted concrete structure stands as a colorful, living canvas buried deep in the canyon. It serves as a striking monument to decades of local lore—and layers of paint—before the road climbs right back out the opposite cliffside toward Groveland.

​

This is Our Dragon

Stretching across a famed 15-mile section of Highway 49 between the tiny Gold Rush towns of Coulterville and Bear Valley, "The Little Dragon" delivers a non-stop, thrilling dose of motorcycle bliss that bypasses the sluggish tourist traffic of the main highway. The route climbs through wide-open, emerald-green foothill ridges—where sweeping views and clear sightlines reveal long ribbons of smooth asphalt in the distance—before carving down a steady series of switchbacks into the Merced River Canyon near the historic site of Bagby.

After crossing the bridge over the waters of Lake McClure, the road immediately climbs back upward with even more intensity, serving up rapid-fire curves, fresh pavement, consistent lean angles, and rapid elevation gains that make Highway 49 - The Little Dragon one of the most celebrated and intoxicating short rides in California. "We came up that?" is the common response from new riders when looking back across the canyon from the southern viewpoint. Yup. And it was awesome. Fist bumps all around.

​

​Smug Satisfaction...

 

There's a quiet roar of excitement when we plan out a new tour.

Using multiple mapping platforms, we carefully design a sequence of roads with a distinct tempo: fast, slow, endless curve, energetic speed, and then a stretch of blacktop that demands all your senses. Once the sequencing is complete, we can sense it's fist-bump special. This region of California is a place to be immersed in excitement, relief, and joy. They are all different emotions, yet for a rider, they seamlessly combine into one.

​
The 4-year old metaphor...

 

Auberry isn't much of a town—it's tiny, has no gas, and features just a small general store. Think ice cream stop. What makes it a motorcycle destination is what surrounds it and, more importantly, what sits behind it: a low ridge, followed by rapid elevation changes as Auberry Road climbs up switchbacks that fold in on themselves.

It's this folding that makes the ride. We climb into the foothills and drop back down toward the valley to the west, repeating the cycle multiple times. There is no straight line here; it's the long way around. No quick way to get there—we're going to find the longest way possible.

Tucked away in the Central Sierra foothills near Kings Canyon National Park, Highway 245 is a well-loved, 29-mile foothill gem that drops down over 4,000 feet from Highway 180 (the busy route into Sequoia National Park) to citrus orchards near Elderwood. Completely bypassed by commercial and RV traffic, the route transitions into a relentless gauntlet of rapid-fire, highly technical curves—especially along the six-mile stretch between Drum Valley Road and the historic Baker Mountain House—where tight twisties and smooth, sacred asphalt force total focus, demanding flick-after-flick transitions with virtually no straights to catch your breath.

As an author and writer of motorcycle road guides, I’m sometimes asked why I used the phrase "a four-year-old in church" to describe Highway 245. First off, you probably have to experience four-year-olds firsthand to get it. The metaphor describes the frenetic, relentless nature of Highway 245's tightest six-mile section. The original Pashnit road article notes that Highway 245 "becomes a four-year-old in church—excited, antsy, incapable of following directions, and they won't stop talking." It highlights how the asphalt never sits still or goes straight. It constantly twitches, bends, and chatter-talks back through your handlebars, forcing you to continuously flick the bike back and forth without a single moment of rest.
It takes the long way.