Near the desert town of Mojave, trails and service roads lie on top of the underground aqueduct. (Photos by Rob Day & Rob Glass)

The Los Angeles Aqueduct is an engineering marvel, a 233-mile channel that carries Sierra snow melt from California?s Owens Valley into the San Fernando Valley. Its five-year construction, completed in 1913, changed the face of Southern California. Without it, there would be no Los Angeles.

But because of it, there was tragedy. Draining the Owens Valley destroyed an entire farming region and turned to dust a lake once grand enough that steamboats crossed it. Building a dam to hold the stolen waters resulted in the second deadliest disaster ever to strike California when the dam collapsed.

Los Angeles Aqueduct ride route from Pearsonville to Santa Paula, California
Click here to view the route above on the REVER app/website

Much of the aqueduct is open waterway, but the rest is a covered concrete channel. And most of that channel functions as a public road. We took a trio of Harley-Davidson Pan Americas and tried to see how much of it we could ride.

It was a hot May morning when we set out from Zakar, a compound that serves as base camp for RawHyde?s adventure motorcycle training school in the Mojave Desert. We wanted to beat the worst of the heat, so shortly after dawn we dashed up State Route 14 to U.S. Route 395 and exited at 9 Mile Canyon Road to catch our first leg of the aqueduct.

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