Baja Adventure Photo Gallery

My unwitting cohorts, comrades in arms, comic relief, photo models and a darned good time: the Colorado Quad Runners ATV Club.

No, they're not real bovine testicles, but Jethro acted as if they were. Who are these people I'm riding with?!

Visiting the local Pemex station. Don't bother looking for some other brand, Pemex is all you get in Mexico. The nationalized oil industry is one of Mexico's biggest, exporting crude all over the world but mostly to the United States.

Unlike in heavily populated Southern California, in Baja the chaparral foliage is allowed to cycle through its burn-and-recover phase, and even this barren scene is in its own way beautiful.

Most of the first day of our trip comprised twisting, rolling, fast trails such as this, to the delight of riders on Yamaha Raptors.

This village inside the national park was home to one of our frequent milk-jug gas stops. Hey, gringo, why are you dressed so funny? One of the things Row likes to stress on his tours is that each one is different due to the unpredictability of Third-World travel. Maybe it's my Southern California upbringing or my frequent trips to the Philippines to visit relatives, but I was at ease the whole time. What impressed me the most was the great riding that seems to go on forever.

Mike's Sky Rancho is a legendary destination for all off-roaders who come to Baja. Deep in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by epic 4WD trails and relatively easy to get to, this mountaintop retreat offers heated rooms, a slightly dodgy pool and excellent food.

Long, graded, dusty roads such as this are the reason 150-plus-mile days are even possible with average riders on stock machines. As in the legendary Paris-Dakar Rally, fun technical sections are connected by long boring roads; luckily, the roads tend to fly by.

Road riding is not only legal but necessary in some areas where there are no trails to connect one section to the next. Despite sporting moderately advanced skills on the trail, I found that I'm a real wuss on pavement, perhaps due to a youth spent on three-wheelers, which really dislike the grippy stuff.

This silty lake bed between Mike's Sky Rancho and San Felipe looks innocent enough, but was actually a challenge to get across with any sort of speed. With one "groove" through the silt (sized for cars, of course), your quad will hunt back and forth on the hard subsurface. Plus, the quads in front of you really throw up some haze. Or you can head off on the silt, which has to be bad for your motor. The 400EX supplied by ATV Baja Tours wouldn't even pull fifth gear in the stuff, the weight of the quad crushing through the upper crust and digging a trench six inches deep flat out for more than 10 miles.

Row's son Josh showed off for the cameras while we waited for stragglers. The little hotshot managed to put this shiny new (borrowed) Z400 in a ditch by the time the ride was over. Good times.

Downtown San Felipe—the beach, the bars, the taco stands, the quads parked on the sidewalk. Our entourage riding through town created a bit of a stir, even though three- and four-wheelers seemed to be the second-most preferred form of transport. At first, the breaded shrimp tacos looked unappetizing, reminding us of something from the freezer section of the local supermarket. But, oh, what a difference fresh shrimp made!

These arches are San Felipe's signature landmarks.