The Elephant Rally: Motorcycling's Great Test of Winter

Somewhere in the Bavarian Forest, in the dead of winter, a valley fills with smoke, snow and several thousand motorcyclists who have chosen to be cold. Tents cling to frozen ground. Campfires hiss against sleet. Riders in every layer they own push heavily-laden bikes through churned mud and slush, and somewhere a two-stroke coughs to life in temperatures that would keep any sensible person indoors. This is the Elefantentreffen, the Elephant Rally, and for the people who go, it is the best weekend of the year. To everyone else it looks like madness. Both things are true.

A gathering named after a war machine

The rally's odd name is the key to its soul. It goes back to the Zündapp KS 601, a big, heavy German motorcycle-and-sidecar combination. The military version, painted green and built to haul through anything, earned the nickname Grüner Elefant, the Green Elephant. After the war, surplus KS 601 outfits ended up in civilian hands, and in the 1950s their owners started meeting up in winter to ride and camp together.

That first gathering of "Elephant" riders gave the event its name and its founding spirit: endurance, camaraderie, and a stubborn refusal to let the season end the riding year. What began as a reunion for a handful of sidecar owners slowly grew into an international institution.

The move to the Bavarian Forest

The rally has not always lived in the same valley. Through the 1970s and 1980s it was held near Salzburg, where it swelled to enormous size, drawing crowds reported at 20,000 to 30,000 riders. That popularity became its own problem. Since 1989 the Elefantentreffen has been held in a valley near Thurmansbang and Solla in the Bavarian Forest, close to the Czech border, in a natural bowl the regulars simply call the Loh. The location was chosen for a very Elephant Rally reason: up here, near the German mountains, snow is more or less guaranteed.

It now takes place on the last weekend of January or the first of February, organised by the Federal Association of Motorcyclists in Germany (the BVDM). Each year somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 riders make the pilgrimage from all over Europe, on everything from immaculate vintage outfits to battered adventure bikes and gloriously impractical custom specials.

Backwards for the future

Part of what keeps the Elefantentreffen special is that it has actively resisted becoming comfortable. As the event grew, so did the temptation to soften it: elaborate heated tents, generators, gear trailered in by van. To the purists, that missed the entire point. The rally is supposed to be hard.

So for the 2015 event, the organisers introduced rules under a wonderfully German banner: Zurück für die Zukunft, "Backwards for the Future." The regulations pushed the rally back to its spartan roots. Participants are expected to ride in on street-legal motorcycles or sidecars and carry their own camping gear on the bike, rather than trailering everything to the edge and unloading. No cheating the cold. If you want to be at the Elephant Rally, you have to earn it the way the KS 601 riders did: on two (or three) wheels, in the snow, with what you can carry.

The Elefantentreffen is not an event you attend. It is a test you pass, and then keep coming back to take again.

Why on earth do they go?

From the warm side of a window, none of this makes sense. Camping in a frozen valley, hands too numb to work a zip, boots soaked through, for fun? But talk to anyone who has done it and the same themes come up.

• The camaraderie. Shared hardship bonds people faster than shared comfort ever could. A stranger who helps you dig your bike out of the snow at midnight is a friend by morning.
• The atmosphere. Firelight, woodsmoke, the glow of a thousand camps in the trees, the ridiculous ingenuity of the custom bikes and hand-built heaters. It is genuinely beautiful.
• The proof. Riding through a European winter to a mountain valley and surviving the weekend is an achievement. You go home having done something most riders never will.
• The tradition. For many it is an annual ritual, decades deep, tying them back to the generations of riders who froze in this same valley before them.

A very different kind of rally

The Elephant Rally sits at the opposite pole from something like the Distinguished Gentleman's Ride. One is a warm May morning in a smart suit; the other is a January night in a snowdrift. Yet they are cousins under the skin, both built on the simple, powerful idea that motorcycles are best enjoyed together, and that the ride itself is only half of it.

For the winter riders of the Loh, the cold is not the price of admission. It is the point. It filters out the fair-weather crowd and leaves only the true believers, huddled around their fires, doing something gloriously, defiantly pointless, and loving every frozen minute. If you ever want to understand the deep, slightly mad heart of motorcycling culture, spend one weekend in that valley. Just pack more layers than you think you need.