Over 90 per cent of the world’s roads are not paved. Why limit yourself?

There are a number of adventure bike training centres in North America. We have a handful of them in Canada, including our own Clinton Smout’s SMART Riding Adventures, but it stands to reason, because of sheer population and year-round riding in some parts south of the border, that there are many more. One of the most prominent adventure bike training centres south of the border is RawHyde Adventures.

RawHyde’s main location is 15 minutes outside of Castaic, CA. — or, looking at the bigger picture, about 45 minutes distance from Burbank, which is the closest international airport. RawHyde also has a summer training centre in Colorado that is located high in the Rocky Mountains with access to a plethora of back country roads and trails. California offers a year-round training facility with arid, sandy and rocky terrain and access to full-on desert locations.
The location for this article is based at the California location for a mid-March break from our cold Canadian winter.

You can never have enough advanced training, regardless of your skill level. Emily and I both took lessons from the RawHyde Adventures training playbook, but we took different courses. There was a time I considered myself a better rider than Emily, but that was long time ago, as she has progressed into a very accomplished rider in most genres of motorcycling.

In saying that, we mutually decided that I would take the “Level 1 — Intro to Adventure” course and Emily, based on her off-road talent and ADV experience, would take the “Level 3 — The Next Step” course. We were both on BMW R1250GSs and we both participated in a half-day refresher course the day before our courses were to run. In Emily’s case, the coaches had to be sure that she had the skills to participate in the Level 3 course.

Getting to RawHyde from the Burbank airport was easy, though I’m not sure that’s what the Uber driver thought once he got to the “driveway.” The training facilities are off the old Golden State Highway, which is not maintained to a high standard, but it’s okay. Turning off the old highway was an obvious concern for our driver, but he persevered and never complained once while slowly taking on the approximately 1.5 km of undulating, twisting driveway that varies between severely broken pavement, gravel, dirt and potholes — it’s a perfect introduction for an Adventure bike course, giving the rider a heightened sense of anticipation for the training, or tense anxiety for an Uber driver.

The RawHyde Ranch is quite a facility, with its own rural infrastructure, including accommodations: there is a large bunkhouse with private rooms on the second floor in addition to a few cabins on the property. The…