Drive through Big Bear Lake on a summer weekend now and you will never guess that for twenty years this was the launching point for the largest off-road motorcycle race in America. The campgrounds where 700 riders staged their bikes are condos. The trails where the race ran are closed or restricted. The story is still here, mostly in the bikes the riders held onto and in the people who remember.

The desert sled is not the bike it is because of any single rider or any single designer. It is the bike it is because of these races, and what the courses demanded from the equipment that ran them.

Big Bear Run, 1949–1968

Started in 1949 by the Lupton family at Lupton’s Trading Post. The race ran 150 miles through the high desert north of San Bernardino, finishing at Big Bear Lake. By the mid-1960s the field was up to 700 riders, with thousands of spectators. The terrain was unforgiving — deep sand, exposed rock, fast fire roads — and the bikes that won were the bikes that survived. The Triumph TR6 Trophy in single-carb form built its reputation on Big Bear.

The race ended in 1968 after a fatal year and growing pressure from the Forest Service on land use. The AMA pulled sanction, the insurance got prohibitive, and the conditions that had made the race possible could not be replicated. The 1968 race was the last one.

Catalina Grand Prix, 1951–1958

Frank Cooper started it in 1951. 100 miles around Avalon and through the interior of Catalina Island. Spectators boated over from the mainland for the race weekend. The course used the dirt roads through the island’s interior and a paved section through Avalon proper.

Bud Ekins won the 250cc class on a Triumph T100 in 1955 and won the 500cc class on a Triumph TR6 in 1956. Eddie Mulder finished on the podium in multiple years. The race ended in 1958 when the Wrigley family, who owned most of Catalina at the time, withdrew support. The 2010 revival was a one-off — a courtesy event, not a continuation — and the conditions that made the original possible no longer exist.

Elsinore Grand Prix, 1968–1980

The race "On Any Sunday" made famous, though it was a real race long before the movie. Street circuit through Lake Elsinore plus a dirt loop through the surrounding hills. McQueen ran it on a Husky 400 in 1971. Plenty of Triumphs in the same field, ridden by riders who took the race more seriously than the movie suggested.

The original event ended in 1980 due to land-use and insurance pressure. A revival ran from 2010 through 2015 with a smaller, modified course. Both are now over. The course is still drivable in pieces if you know where to look.

AMA District 37

The AMA-sanctioned regional body for Southern California off-road racing. Founded in 1937, still active. The Mojave-based clubs — Dirt Diggers, Greyhounds, Lost Coyotes, Checkers, Hilltoppers — ran hare scrambles, enduros, hare-and-hound events through the high desert from the 1940s into the 1980s. Most of the clubs still exist, with smaller fields and on smaller pieces of land.

The bikes that won District 37 events in the 1960s set the spec for what a desert sled was. The lifting of the front end, the high pipes, the dirt gearing, the single Amal — all of those choices were made because they helped a TR6C finish a 100-mile point-to-point in deep sand without breaking.

What is left

District 37 still sanctions events, mostly on private land or designated OHV areas. The Hare and Hound at Lucerne Valley is the closest modern descendant of the Big Bear format. The Mojave Road is still drivable end-to-end if you want a self-guided version of what those races felt like. The Mint 400 in Nevada is the closest spiritual cousin to the original Big Bear Run.

The vintage motorcycle scene has its own events that honor the era: Hanford Vintage MX, the Velocette Owners’ Club National Rally, the Quail Motorcycle Gathering. They are not races. They are gatherings. The races, in the form that the desert sled was built to win, are mostly over.

The bikes outlasted the races by forty years. That is a large part of why a clean TR6C is worth what it is.

Where to read more

Don Emde’s "Daytona 200: The History of America’s Premier Motorcycle Race" covers some of the same scene from the AMA side. Bud Ekins’ "The Bud Ekins Story" (out of print, findable used) is the racer’s view from inside the JoMo team. Cycle World’s archive from 1965 to 1975 has race coverage that has not been digitized — back issues are worth tracking down if you collect motorcycle paper.