MOTORCYCLE TRAVEL IN United States

Riding Route 66 by motorcycle means crossing the entire country along the original alignment of the first transcontinental highway, connecting Chicago to Santa Monica: 3,940 km, opened on November 11, 1926.

John Steinbeck named it "the Mother Road" in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, when thousands of families used it to flee the Dust Bowl toward California. The name stuck forever.

The highway lost its official numbering in 1985, replaced by the interstate system, but survives as Historic Route 66 thanks to entire communities that organized to preserve its neon motels, vintage signs, and the eight states it crosses (California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri and Illinois).

For international riders it's the ultimate bucket-list trip: Harley-Davidson rental shops in Los Angeles and Chicago live almost exclusively off European and Latin American motorcyclists who come specifically to ride it.

Riding the Pacific Coast Highway by motorcycle through Big Sur means crossing one of the most photographed coastal stretches on the planet: 72 miles (116 km) of pavement carved into the cliffs of the Santa Lucia Mountains, built between 1919 and 1937 almost entirely by hand.

The icon of the ride is Bixby Bridge, a 320-foot (98m) arch completed in 1932, five years before the rest of the highway, and today one of the most photographed bridges in the United States.

It's a living, fragile road: recent landslides have forced full closures, like the Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge collapse in 2017 (8-month closure, $24 million rebuild) and the Mud Creek slide that same year, which buried a third of a mile of road under tons of earth and rock.

That's why no serious rider heads out to Big Sur without checking the road's status the same day: last-minute detours are common.

Riding the Tail of the Dragon by motorcycle means tackling 318 certified curves in just 18 km of US-129, between North Carolina and Tennessee, the highest curve density of any road in the United States, and the reason it's carried that nickname since 1981.

The road hugs Great Smoky Mountains National Park without a single house, business, or driveway along the entire stretch, with curves named by riders themselves: Copperhead Corner, Hog Pen Bend, Wheelie Hell.

It's also the road with the most professional motorcycle-photography businesses in the country: outfits like Killboy set up at the curves to sell photos to every rider who passes through, a business that only exists because of the sheer volume of motorcyclists who pilgrimage here.

The speed limit dropped from 55 to 30 mph in 2005 after years of crashes, and the Blount County Rescue Squad keeps a standing presence on summer weekends just for this stretch.

Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway by motorcycle means covering 755 km of gentle curves designed purely for scenic cruising: no trucks, no billboards, not a single traffic light between Virginia and North Carolina.

Construction began on September 11, 1935 and was substantially finished by 1966, with the exception of the Linn Cove Viaduct, an engineering feat wrapped around Grandfather Mountain so complex it wasn't completed until 1987.

Since 1946, it has been the single most visited unit in the entire U.S. National Park System almost every year, ahead of even the Grand Canyon.

The speed limit never exceeds 45 mph and drops lower in several sections, so the Blue Ridge Parkway by motorcycle is meant to be ridden slowly, through 26 tunnels cut into the mountain and overlooks every few kilometers.

Crossing the Going-to-the-Sun Road by motorcycle means traversing the Continental Divide through the heart of Glacier National Park, built between 1921 and 1932 and formally dedicated on July 15, 1933, at a cost of $2.5 million at the time.

The high point, Logan Pass, sits at 6,646 feet (2,026m), and in winter it accumulates up to 80 feet (24m) of snow, which is why the maintenance crew needs up to 10 weeks every spring just to reopen the road.

It's a National Historic Landmark for its engineering: stone retaining walls, tunnels, and curves literally cut into the cliff face, with the stretch between Logan Pass and the Loop so narrow it restricts vehicles taller than 10 feet.

The full-opening window is short and variable, in 2022 it didn't fully open until July 13, so every rider planning around it checks the road's status week by week.

Climbing the Beartooth Highway by motorcycle means riding up to Beartooth Pass, at 10,947 feet (3,337m), on a road opened June 14, 1936, straddling the Montana-Wyoming border.

Legendary CBS News correspondent Charles Kuralt famously called it "America's most beautiful drive," a line that's been repeated in every tourism brochure and motorcycle travel blog that mentions it since.

It's only open about five months a year, from mid-May to mid-October, with a series of switchbacks and hairpins that climb from forest to treeless alpine tundra in just a few kilometers.

It's the northeast gateway to Yellowstone: most riders combine it with a park entry right on the other side of Cooke City.

Riding the Million Dollar Highway by motorcycle means climbing Red Mountain Pass, at 11,018 feet (3,358m), on a road carved in 1924 over the ruins of Colorado's silver mining boom.

No one agrees on where the name comes from: some say it cost a million dollars a mile to build in the 1920s, others that the road's fill dirt contains a million dollars in gold ore. Neither legend is confirmed, and that uncertainty is part of the myth.

The ruins of the Idarado Mine are still visible climbing the pass, with the remains of the Longfellow Mine further along, a reminder that this road was built to haul silver out of the mountain, not for tourism.

The reason it shows up on every 'most dangerous roads in America' list is simple: sheer cliffs, narrow lanes, and an almost total absence of guardrails along several stretches.

Riding the Cherohala Skyway by motorcycle is the natural companion to any pilgrimage to the Tail of the Dragon: 69 km climbing over 1,200 meters of elevation change between the Cherokee and Nantahala national forests, the source of its name.

It was planned starting in 1958 but took nearly four decades to build, it finally opened on October 12, 1996, at a final cost of about $100 million, one of the most expensive road projects in Tennessee and North Carolina history.

Unlike the Dragon, there aren't 318 tight curves here to work the bike hard, just long, sweeping panoramic views across the Unicoi Mountains: the perfect loop to slow the pace down after the adrenaline of Deals Gap.

Almost no rider reaches the area without doing both roads on the same trip: it's just a 20-minute transfer between the end of one and the start of the other.

Riding the Highway 12 by motorcycle, officially named "A Journey Through Time Scenic Byway," means covering 198 km of landscape running from Bryce Canyon's pink cliffs to the red rock of Grand Staircase-Escalante, ending at the stone domes of Capitol Reef National Park.

The most talked-about stretch among riders is the Hogback, where the road literally runs along the top of a rock ridge with a drop on both sides and almost no shoulder, one of the few places in the U.S. where the road itself feels like a suspended overlook.

It's one of the very few roads in the country with the All-American Road designation, the highest category the federal government grants a scenic highway, reserved only for routes that offer something you can't see anywhere else.

Elevation swings hard over just a few kilometers: you climb from desert floor to the conifer forest of Boulder Mountain, a change in vegetation and temperature the rider feels in their own body.

Climbing the Trail Ridge Road by motorcycle means reaching 12,183 feet (3,713m) at its highest point, the highest continuous paved road in all of North America, built between 1929 and 1938 inside Rocky Mountain National Park.

More than 20 km of the route runs above the treeline, through pure alpine tundra, where the average January temperature drops to -11°C and July barely reaches 10°C: the rider crosses, in minutes, an ecosystem that at other latitudes only appears thousands of meters higher.

Snow is the constant problem: over 38 inches (nearly a meter) fall each year on the high section, and the maintenance crew uses wooden poles driven into the road's edge just to know where the route is buried under snow when they clear it each spring.

Today's grades reach 7%, far gentler than the 16% of the original 1921 road, proof of how much the route had to be redesigned to make it safely passable.