Welcome to the early B2V Thanksgiving week post. I haven’t had a chance to write anything lately, so I figured I’d wrap it up with a story about one of the coolest race/rides to ever take place in North America.

The Barstow to Vegas desert race kicked off in 1967 and officially ran through 1975. The BLM and Sierra Club eventually managed to get it shut down for a handful of reasons, mainly citing endangered species concerns—which I’ve always thought was garbage considering the Barstow area is also home to the Fort Irwin Army Training Center. Heavy equipment and tanks tore up the same terrain where the original racecourse started, and trust me, they do far more damage than any dirt bike ever could.

I was lucky enough to  do the Barstow to Vegas run with my dad and uncle in 1982 at the ripe old age of 14. Back then it was basically a “protest ride,” not sanctioned or organized. Our family camped out in the middle of nowhere outside of Barstow, and in the morning we took off on our dirt adventure toward Vegas at our own pace. I still have vivid memories of my mom cooking up a full Thanksgiving turkey dinner, fixings and all and brought it to camp. That was pretty awesome.

The Barstow to Vegas ride could be challenging, but we mostly stayed along the power line roads near the I-15, which also made it easier to find the turnoffs to the pits where my mom would meet us to fuel up. The trail was rocky and dusty. I took a few good-sized rocks to the knee from my dad’s YZ-465 with that monster Teraflex rear tire. I was also riding a YZ-465 at 14 (yes, I’m a big kid), and my uncle had come out from back East just to do this historic ride with us. He could be unpredictable on a bike and ended up taking off ahead of us on my Husky 250 OR that I had just put brand-new bars, fenders, and tires on and promptly endoed it over a cactus, tearing all that new stuff right off it. He wasn’t hurt too bad, but it took a while to get the bike patched up enough to keep going.

One of the biggest lessons in desert riding: it may look flat and straight, but if you ride over your head, you can earn yourself a quick trip to the hospital.

The rest of the ride wasn’t too eventful for me since I was already desert racing in SoCal and had the endurance for long runs. Then we hit Clark Mountain. It was winter, already cold, and when we started climbing, it began to snow. None of us were prepared for that. But what were we going to do? We didn’t have cell phones back then to call my mom for a rescue. The terrain was rocky, it was freezing, I couldn’t feel my hands anymore, and by the time we rolled into Primm, we had decided to call it quits for the day.

Overall, it was an experience I’ll never forget, and considering the historical significance of the B2V in the desert racing community, I was proud to say I made it almost all the way at 14.

From 1983 to 1989 the race was revived again, but eventually it was shut down once more by the Sierra Club and BLM after claims of discovering some “endangered blunt-nosed lizard muffin,” tortoises, or whatever else they could come up with at the time. The race in its original format was never run again.

It’s a shame that we’re continuously losing land to camp and ride on. Kids today will never know the thrill of a big off-road event like this, and that’s sad. If you want to keep what little land we have left, get involved with the organizations fighting to protect it. That’s the only way we survive.

If you’re interested in some history on the Barstow to Vegas race, here are a few cool links:

https://www.cyclenews.com/2021/01/article/archives-column-barstow-to-vegas-hare-hound/
https://www.bobrohrer.com/pdf_files/barstow-to-vegas.pdf
Here’s a particularly cool story from way back in 1971:
https://www.vitalmx.com/forums/Moto-Related,20/BARSTOW-TO-VEGAS-NOV-21-1971,1396612