There are few feelings I despise more than waking up and not being able to feel my toes. Yet, that’s the ante you occasionally must up if you plan to tackle an epic.To get more news about electric mountain bike, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
When we woke on our second morning in Death Valley, temps were hovering in the low 20s, frost covered my sleeping bag, and the batteries on our e-mountain bikes had shut off because they, like us, aren’t fond of the cold. On the plus side, the sun would soon rise and we knew morale would spike with it. Making coffee with dawn views of the Racetrack, a phenomenon where rocks almost magically move by themselves, wasn’t bad either.The five of us, a riffraff crew from Durango, CO, Mammoth, CA, and Jackson, WY, had come together to test a new electric bike from Specialized, the Turbo Levo SL. Long miles of washboard dirt roads, loose rocky climbs, and empty basin and range country was on the docket. The new SL weighs in at just 33 pounds, not much more than most non-electric mountain bikes, and we hoped it would be the ideal tool to unlock a new route, using the pedal-assist to get up the biggest climbs, without a huge weight penalty.To get more news about electric bike, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
Over the course of the week we learned a lot—and probably set a world record for distance ridden on e-bikes with the power off, which I imagine we’ll hold for a while. [Spoiler alert] In the end the bikes did their job admirably, adding enough juice to climb 5,000-foot passes while meandering through the largest national park in the lower 48. Linking together a trio of resupply spots, we rode a loop that probably isn’t possible with normal pedal bikes, outside of the fittest riders in the world. Here’s how we did it.To get more news about Fat Tire Electric Bikes, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
The Place: Death Valley might not get the love that its neighbors to the west, Yosemite and Sequoia, are accustomed to, nor those to its east—Zion, Arches and the Grand Canyon—either. The relative obscurity of this hot, dry, and huge park is exactly what makes it special, though. One and a half times larger than Yellowstone, the second largest park in the lower 48, Death Valley encompasses a sprawling 3.4 million acres of desolate land, connected primarily by rugged dirt roads. The park includes the lowest elevation in the country, Badwater, at 279 feet below sea level, up to Telescope Peak, just over 11,000 feet.
The Route: We hoped to connect some of the most iconic yet undervalued and least-visited places in the park, including Saline Warm Springs, the Racetrack and Grandstand, Ubehebe Crater, Titus and Echo Canyons, Badwater Basin, Devil’s Cornfield, Mesquite Dunes, and Darwin Falls, all by bike. To do so we would need to ride over 300 miles with 30,000 feet of climbing, mostly on dirt. A few folks that had bikepacked in Death Valley before us said with very little uncertainty that we were crazy—averaging anything over 30 miles per day was hard if not impossible on these roads. And water would be almost non-existent. Despite the warning, we went for it anyway.
Starting in the northwest corner, we rode a large loop in a clockwise direction, stopping to camp each night when we had little to no energy left. To make it all possible, we stopped in Beatty, Furnace Creek, and Panamint Springs, to recharge the bikes and refill on water. At times we rode with 8 liters each, so that we could go two days sans potable water. The terrain in this corner of the country is colloquially called ‘basin and range,’ and we quickly learned why. Reaching each subsequent valley required a serious climb up a mountain pass, many of which were thousands of feet and took hours to ride up.
