touring | The Filson Journal

person in silver helmet and black jacket riding a motorcycle down a rocky embankment in the high desert of the Utah Canyonlands

The Utah Traverse

It’s often easy to get lost in the severe beauty of southern Utah in the high desert lands of the Colorado Plateau. The parched and arid red sandstone landscape is unforgiving, mountains and ridges appear everywhere shimmering in the distance, and plunging canyons seem to materialize out of thin air. While it can take your breath away it also demands respect from anyone journeying through it.

So, when four friends decided to take their off-road motorcycles on an epic weeklong trip across this region, they knew that things could and would probably go crooked quickly. But that is the beauty of doing the Utah Traverse.

DIY: Ammo Can Panniers

The objective of this build is to come up with a low-cost solution to the more expensive factory-produced or aftermarket panniers used on adventure touring bikes.

Most factory-produced pannier racks have become inexpensive enough and a homemade one takes considerable time to build. So we will concentrate on just the Ammo Can part of the build. The bike used in this installation came used with the factory racks installed, but the installation could be easily modified to fit almost any rack, including homemade. I chose easily available and inexpensive hardware to keep the cost down. You can substitute whatever is available locally. Also, the length of the hardware can easily be modified; if only longer bolts are available, simply cut down the excess threads.

Shmulik Avital & Spiegel – The Hub of NYC’s Moto Community

Shmulik Avital seems to know everyone who rides a motorcycle in New York City. His restaurant, Spiegel, has become the hub of the city’s adventure motorcycling community.