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"Taste of Dakar" began back in 2012 when AltRider decided they wanted to do a couple of things. One was establish a relationship with the riding community through a destination type event. The other was to literally give riders a taste of what riding the Dakar rally might look like. Now of course the Dakar is run by professionals on custom designed 450cc rally bikes over severe terrain in stages that are sometimes 1,000 km or longer. This was designed to be more for the weekend adventure bike rider and has levels of difficulty depending on what type of rider you are (A, B, C). The first was held at Shoshone RV park in Shoshone, CA. This was really more of an experiment and it's clear AltRider has learned much because each event has been better than the one before. Here's a video from that first one. I got my tracks jacked up because my 60 CSx won't handle tracks of over 500 points so it truncated most of the "intermediate" tracks I wanted to ride and I think I ended up routing us on one of the advanced sections because it was a very long and loose sand wash. Luckily, Jimmy Lewis rode by and showed us an easier way out and we finished without too much trouble. The 2013 event was moved over to Pahrump, NV to the Lakeside RV resort. This wasn't really ideal since there was only one shower and the ducks from the lake crapped everywhere and were quacking all night long. It got really cold too, like 25 degrees. The tracks seemed better this year, at least the intermediate ones I rode. They asked me if I'd let two journalists ride in my group and I said "sure as long as they can ride." They could ride for sure! The highlight was ending at Big Dune and riding my 600 lb pig in dunes for the first time ever AND... with none other than Johnny Campbell and Jimmy Lewis. I thought I had died and gone to heaven! But this ride report is for the 2014 Taste of Dakar. In so many ways this event exceeded the prior two. For one, they held it at the Wine Ridge RV resort, which has MANY hot showers as well as a jacuzzi, laundry, car wash, wi-fi, etc... The tracks were AMAZING. And of course the weather was a treat; we had a major rain/snow storm blow through that actually made for epic desert riding conditions. Since the event, this video by Ride of My Life's Brad Barker, has really taken the event to mythical status. I rode up on Thursday with Rich and we had planned to ride the day before. We ended up riding the intermediate tracks in reverse order (no big deal really) but in the afternoon, the storm really intensified and we got caught in a flash flood and for a while, it was a bit dicey exactly how we would get ourselves out of that area...