About

Burnszilla

Stephen in grey and red riding gear on his black and white BMW R1200GS beside the Independence Pass sign, Continental Divide, elevation 12,095 feet — Independence Pass, Colorado: 12,095 feet on the Continental Divide, riding the GS to the BMW MOA rally in Gillette, Wyoming, 2008.

Stephen Burns rides BMW motorcycles and writes about it.

Burnszilla is where he did that from 2004 to 2009: ride reports from Big Sur to Death Valley and up through the Northwest, gear reviews from boots to helmets, and the occasional bike that didn't make it home.

From 2007 to 2013 he also wrote features, reviews and photography for BMW Owners News, the magazine of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America.

Where the name came from

In 2001 I traded AOL Canada for AOL and Netscape in Silicon Valley, and America Online would not let me bring my Canadian screen name across the border. Apparently screen names need a work visa too. I needed a new one, fast. I had spent the whole day working on music search and fixing front-end bugs, which means I had spent the whole day in Bugzilla, the bug filing software we all lived in back then. Netscape also had a little dinosaur mascot named Mozilla. I did the math. Burns plus zilla. Burnszilla.

I took the name to the BMW MOA forum and to ADVrider. If you were in the motorcycle community 25 years ago, you know plenty of riders were better known by their screen names than their real ones. Mine stuck. People still call me Burnszilla, and I still answer to it.

I let this blog lapse in 2009, and while I wasn't looking, spammers moved into the code of the old Movable Type platform and made themselves at home. So I downloaded the entire site and did a frame-off restoration: evicted the spam, rebuilt everything and dug a lot more photos out of the archive to go with the stories, with some help from Claude Code. Burnszilla will live on.

Stephen and Sharon riding two-up on the R1200GS along a coastal highway — Two-up on the GS with Sharon.

The original Burnszilla logo.