After years of toil and trouble — not really, it was all a blast! — I finally completed a multi-year plan to ride my motorcycle over every one of the major Sierra Nevada passes that have paved roads. Those are, in the order in which I rode them:
- Ebbetts
- Luther
- Carson
- Tioga
- Sonora
- Sherman (well, that’s what I call it because that’s the name of the road that crosses it…but I’m not sure it has an official name)
- Donner
- Yuba
- Beckwourth
From north to south the order is Yuba/Beckwourth, Donner, Ebbetts, Luther/Carson, Sonora, Tioga, Sherman. There are a few other passes with roads that I haven’t gotten to yet, at least on my motorcycle. But they’re relatively minor, IMHO (e.g., Walker, Fredonyer).
I was originally going to take CA-162 west across the San Joaquin Valley to Covelo, CA. I’d made reservations to stay at a nice little motel there…only to find that 50+ miles of the route is a dirt road. A well-maintained dirt road, but a dirt road nevertheless. Currently experiencing late season snow melt at the upper elevations (~5,000 feet).
Not something I’d want to take on with a street bike 
. Instead, I opted to tour large parts of the San Joaquin Delta just west of Sacramento.
Click on any of the icons on the following map to jump to particular observations about the site. Or follow the links below the map to the day-by-day trip reports.
