1999 Cycle News Mojave Dual Sport ride
(Top) The start of our journey: Camp Rock
Road.
(Above) Negotiating Box Canyon.
(Left) eN assistant editor Matt Freeman is
"all smiles" while tooling on the Uptite
Husky outside Ludlow.
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some of the greatest off-road terrain
imaginable for those who remember
what it used to be like to just take off on
your bike and get lost for days. The
rules of the game have changed a little
but, as convoluted as it sounds, thQ e
willing to make a concession or two in
order to play by them can still experience the bird-on-a-wing freedom that
Mojave has to offer. That was the
premise for our '99 Cycle News Dual
Sport ride, where five edjtors, one. photographer/t.rail guide, one buddy and
one brother-m-Iaw spent the better part
of two days virtually lost to civili7..ation,
trekking across vast, uninhabited portions of Southern California aboard
some pretty sweet hardware.
See, this was to be no ordinary dualsport ride, as the bulk of the machinery
used was far from your run-of-the-mill
dual-sport. Five of the eight macmnes
we.re personal bikes and/or rolling test
beds for some of the who's who in the
world of aftermarket four-stroke motorcycle equipment. All five featured modjfications that transformed them from
mundane four-strokes (Yamahas excepted) into full-blown hot-rod adrenaline
generators, capable of supercharging
both pulse and respiration via their
razor-sharp handling, Ughtning quickness, eyeball-flattening top speed or any
combination thereof. Our only rule for
the ride was that the companies
involved make sure tha t thill offerings
were street-legal, with current registra-
