My Fraught Mountain Adventure on a Ryvid Anthem Electric Motorcycle

An adventure is when you don’t know how things are going to turn out.

I just had an adventure with the stylish and cool Ryvid Anthem electric motorcycle. Ryvid is a company founded by designer Dong Tran. The company builds electric motorcycles right here in Southern California. Their website shows urban hipsters commuting to work at tech startups, disconnecting the 4.3-kWh battery from the bike, and wheeling it into their cubicles to charge all day. Damn those hipsters!

It was the website’s claim of “up to 75 miles range” that launched my adventure. Had I scrolled down just a little further, I would have seen the size of the battery and realized that in order to go 75 miles using only 4.3 kWh, you would have to get more than 17 miles from each kWh, which is actually possible, and I did it later, albeit on flat ground in city traffic.

Of course, I didn’t really consider that before I decided to take the Ryvid 35 miles uphill into the San Gabriel Mountains for the Good Vibrations Breakfast Club. GVBC is held every Friday at the long-closed Newcomb’s Ranch, 5,340-feet up in the San Gabriels on Angeles Crest Highway. One vertical mile effects BEV range.

Hopelessly optimistic, off I set, wrapped in the best Dainese Gore-Tex riding gear I owned, one eyeball on the amp gauge, one on the road ahead looking for squirrels, and a third eye in the tiny rearview mirrors ready to dodge the Porsches that would soon be blowing by me.

The gauge kept dropping, from 100% after I’d recharged it at the base of the highway, to 75, 50, 25… I was doomed. I finally gave up at a point maybe five miles short of Newcomb’s with the gauge reading 17%.

I knew there was an electrical outlet at the Ranch, but the power had been shut off at that place since it closed shortly after Covid hit. There was a visitor’s center up there, but it wasn’t always open. All I could do was coast downhill and pray to the gods of regenerative braking.

Problem was, it wasn’t all downhill. There were miles-long uphill stretches, which the battery charge gauge didn’t like. At about 12% charge I was back at the gate where ACH was closed for landslide repair. Like everyone else, I’d had to take a bypass route that added 20 miles to the trip, up Upper Big Tujunga Canyon and back to ACH. If I could just take the shorter, closed portion of ACH I might make it to the old ranger station at Red Box. That was closed, too, but there might be an electrical outlet still there, somewhere.