Death Valley with "Ride Must Go On"

Eric Hall · December 16, 2014

I had met Tolga Basol of "Ride Must Go On" a few months back when I had him and his professional photographer friend Caglar Erkenci stayed with me for a few days while they prepped their loaner bikes for the US leg of their round-the-world adventure. Tolga is a film maker and has done some truly amazing stuff. Check it out:

https://vimeo.com/109671709

Tolga is sponsored by KTM Turkey, along with many other familiar vendors: Konflict Suspension, Giant Loop, Rottweiler Performance, etc... He started in Istanbul in June and rode his 1190 R to Magadan (the first to ride that bike there).

Thierry and I had just ridden in Pahrump, NV the week before and he went on to Death Valley and I went back home to work for a few days, coming back to DV on Thur of that week. Tolga and Caglar are making their way back down south after picking up Tolga's 1190 R in Vancouver and stopped at Death Valley to ride with us. We camped at Panamint Springs Resort.

Tolga and Caglar are absolutely brilliant with a camera for photos and video, so don't let this lame amateur's attempt at video distract you from their work

They took some amazing photos of us all that you can see in the gallery as well as posted here below.

There was a storm supposed to move through on Friday, so I brought my lower-profile tent instead of the Redverz "Garage-mahal." As it turned out though, the guys moved to the tent-cabins based on a suggestion from the camp staff that the storm was going to be quite severe. It did rain pretty steadily for a long time but the storm wasn't that bad. Still, it was nice to have a bigger tent to cook in and all that. Talk about glamping!

Eric Hall · December 16, 2014

Here is Thierry's video of his ride a few days before I showed up with Alex Guth and Fletch Newland

I got there Thur afternoon and we rode mostly Panamint Valley over to Ballarat and back.

Friday they all pussed out from the weather so we drove into Ridgecrest for some wi-fi at Starbucks and some great Mexican food at Olvera's. I knew they had been riding every day up to that, so I cut them some slack.

Saturday we decided to ride and got a bit of a late start. Some communication issues had us losing Caglar (he went to Lone Pine looking for us) so we went on after waiting and search for an hour. We didn't get far up Saline Valley road when we were stopped by snow at 5700 feet. I knew it was going to get steeper and deeper, so we turned around. We got back to PSR and saw Caglar there waiting

After that, we decided to go check out the Charcoal Kilns and weren't disappointed. There was some snow the last half mile or so on that road but we powered through it without too much trouble.