Harleys in the Sahara
El Solitario MC took three Harley-Davidsons — road bikes, highway cruisers, six hundred pounds of American asphalt machinery — and rode them 2,500 miles across the desert. It was either the dumbest idea in custom motorcycle history or the purest expression of what custom building is actually for.
Pemulis Water & Power • February 2026
There is a tradition in motorcycle culture of building bikes for places they don't belong. A café racer for a road that has no café at the end of it. A flat tracker for a city with no dirt oval. A scrambler for a suburb where the most aggressive terrain is a speed bump in a Whole Foods parking lot. The custom world is full of machines optimized for hypothetical conditions, bikes that suggest adventure without ever encountering it, and the gap between the motorcycle's aesthetic promise and its actual use is wide enough that most people have stopped noticing it. The bike says desert. The rider commutes to a coworking space. The bike says race. The rider has never turned a lap. This is fine. This is how most consumer culture works — the object evokes a lifestyle, and the lifestyle sells the object, and nobody's supposed to notice that the two never actually meet.
El Solitario MC noticed. And their response — characteristically — was to close the gap in the most absurd way possible. They took three Harley-Davidsons and rode them across the Sahara Desert.
The Wrong Bike for the Job
To understand why this matters, you have to understand what a Harley-Davidson is and what it isn't. A Harley-Davidson is a highway motorcycle. It is designed to carry a large person at moderate speed down a paved American road in relative comfort, with an engine tuned for torque at low RPM, a chassis engineered for straight-line stability, and a weight that typically ranges between five hundred and eight hundred pounds depending on the model. It is not designed for sand. It is not designed for heat that warps metal. It is not designed for terrain that shifts under the wheels, or for isolation so complete that a mechanical failure is not a roadside inconvenience but a survival situation. A Harley-Davidson in the Sahara is a fish on a bicycle — the wrongness of the combination is the first and most obvious thing about it, and any sensible person looking at the project plan would have said so immediately and been correct.
El Solitario is not operated by sensible people, or rather, they are operated by people for whom the sensible choice is always the least interesting one, and the Desert Wolves project proceeded on the conviction that the wrongness of the combination was exactly the point. If you want to cross the Sahara on a motorcycle, you ride a KTM or a BMW GS or any of the purpose-built adventure bikes that the motorcycle industry has spent decades optimizing for exactly this kind of terrain. You do not ride a Harley. Unless you are trying to prove something about the relationship between a machine and the conditions it was designed for — unless you are arguing, through the act of riding, that the worst possible platform forced into the worst possible environment will teach you more about both the platform and the environment than the right tool for the job ever could.
What the Desert Strips Away
The preparation for a Sahara crossing on a Harley-Davidson requires removing everything from the motorcycle that exists to make it a Harley-Davidson. The chrome goes. The comfort features go. The styling elements that make the bike recognizable as a member of the Harley family — the silhouette, the proportions, the visual language that says "American highway" — all of it gets stripped back to the mechanical essentials, because the Sahara does not care about brand identity or heritage narrative or the emotional associations that a motorcycle manufacturer has spent a century cultivating. The desert cares about ground clearance, suspension travel, cooling capacity, fuel range, and whether the chain will hold. Everything else is weight, and weight in sand is the enemy.
What emerged from this process was something that looked less like a Harley-Davidson and more like a machine that happened to have a Harley-Davidson engine in it — which is, if you think about it, a more honest representation of what the motorcycle actually is. Underneath the chrome and the leather and the cultural mythology, every motorcycle is an engine and a frame and two wheels and a set of problems that need solving, and the Sahara forced El Solitario to solve those problems without the assistance of the brand's carefully constructed identity. The bikes had to work on the merits of their engineering, not the strength of their story, and the engineering of a Harley-Davidson forced to cross the Sahara turns out to be a fascinating study in the difference between what a machine is designed to do and what it can be made to do if you're stubborn enough and skilled enough and willing to accept a certain amount of suffering.
"We do not produce show bikes, as we despise that genre — understanding that it is a shame to spend countless hours constructing a supposedly liberating instrument like a motorcycle, for the sole purpose of looking at it."
— David Borras, Bike EXIF
Twenty-Five Hundred Miles
The crossing covered 2,500 miles of Saharan terrain, which is a distance that sounds manageable until you consider what those miles consist of. Sand that buries wheels. Heat that reaches temperatures at which engine components expand beyond their tolerances. Dust that infiltrates every moving part and turns lubricant into grinding paste. Wind that erases the road, when there is a road, and erases the landscape when there isn't, leaving you navigating by GPS through a featureless expanse that looks the same in every direction. No service stations. No cell coverage in most areas. No tow trucks. No margin for the kind of mechanical failure that, on a paved road in a developed country, would mean a phone call and a wait. In the Sahara, a broken chain or a seized bearing or an overheated engine means you're walking, and walking in the Sahara is not a recreational activity.
The Desert Wolves completed the crossing. The bikes held. The engines ran. The chains stayed on. And the photographs that came out of the project — riders dwarfed by dune fields that extend to every horizon, Harleys parked against nothing, the machinery looking simultaneously wrong and right in a landscape that has no use for it — became some of the most striking images in El Solitario's fifteen-year catalog, because they capture something that the custom motorcycle world almost never shows: a bike that has been genuinely tested, in conditions that are genuinely hostile, and that survived not because it was the right machine for the job but because the people who built it and rode it refused to accept that the job was impossible.
The Argument
The Desert Wolves project makes an argument that the rest of El Solitario's work supports but never states as directly: that the purpose of a custom motorcycle is not to be admired, or photographed, or displayed at a show, or featured in a magazine, or liked on social media. The purpose of a custom motorcycle is to go somewhere on it, preferably somewhere difficult, and to learn something about the machine and about yourself in the process. This sounds like a platitude — of course you should ride the thing you built — but in a custom world where the most celebrated machines are often the ones least likely to leave the showroom, where "built not bought" has become a slogan rather than a practice, and where the average custom build's most strenuous outing is a slow roll to a weekend cars-and-coffee, the Desert Wolves' 2,500 miles of Saharan sand is not a platitude. It is an indictment.
David Borras has said that he despises the show bike genre, that he considers it a shame to spend countless hours building a liberating instrument for the sole purpose of looking at it, and the Desert Wolves are the proof that he means it. You cannot take a Harley across the Sahara ironically. You cannot do it as a branding exercise. You can only do it if you genuinely believe that the act of riding is the act that justifies the act of building, and that the only honest test of a motorcycle is a test that might break it.
"People don't like freedom and they get violent when they sit in front of it."
— David Borras
The Desert Wolves gear — Dyneema riding pants, jerseys, protective layers — was designed for the same crossing and is part of what we carry at Pemulis Water & Power. El Solitario MC apparel and riding gear: built by people who ride across deserts on the wrong motorcycle, because the wrong motorcycle is always the more interesting choice.
Check out our El Solitario collection, including the Dirt Wolves T-Shirt and Wolf MX Jersey.