An open Butler map, your shortcut to joy in (nearly) any U.S. state. Just follow the golden roads. Weaving between hundred-year-old bunkers and the sea is Conzelman Road.
Cayce Clifford
When did you last unfold a map? Not the pinch-to-zoom kind; I mean an actual map made of ink and wrinkles, of paper and possibilities.
For most of us, it’s been years. We dumpstered Rand McNally way back and put our trust in the machines. Now algorithms guide us on drab slogs from A to B.
Where’s the magic in that?
I ponder the question for a moment, then spread open a paper map of Northern California. Over my shoulder, the delicate wrists of the Golden Gate Bridge rise like stalks from the gray soup below. Framed against the 2023 BMW M2’s periwinkle hood, the map beckons like an invitation.
Among the paper maps we have left, Butler maps stand apart. Intended for motorcyclists, a Butler map grades every paved road by the joy it brings a rider. Orange roads meet a baseline for curviness, challenge, and enjoyment, even peril. Roads highlighted red rate one step better. But the golden G1 roads—the highest grade on a Butler map—are heavenly enough to spend a lifetime chasing.
Peril is key to any great Butler road. Not sure what we mean? Drive fast here.
Cayce Clifford
Court Butler did. In 2008, Butler Motorcycle Maps’ eponymous founder was working off student debt in a flooring shop. On weekends, he was his riding group’s de facto planner, scouring forums and doing the hard miles to plot out the perfect road trip. But from 9 to 5, Butler stared out the shop window at his bike, yearning.
He thought people needed to share in the kind of knowledge he was working so hard to accumulate. Some might even pay for it.
So Butler and his father dug their spurs into the idea and sent hundreds of thousands of miles rushing under their front fenders. They rode so far for so long that entire motorcycles collapsed under them from the effort. Eventually, Butler had surveyed every paved road in his home state of Colorado.
The entire state.
It snowballed. More riders joined the effort to catalog epic roads, state by state. All that work, those years in the saddle, that hard-won personal touch—it’s what you’re paying for with a Butler map.
The M2 in repose, Tomales Bay, California. Just don’t look at the stunted snout.
Cayce Clifford
So when BMW flashed us keys to a new M2, we put a question to Butler. Where would you spend a final day on the road, threading one golden G1 with the next? A map of Northern California showed up in the mail, complete with marching orders: Keep the Pacific on your left shoulder, kick up your heels, and enjoy the ride.
I close the Butler map, vault into the M2’s carbon bucket seat, slot the shifter into first gear, and let the clutch out at a crawl. From the very first inch of the route, a taste of Butler gold.
Conzelman Road is a slo-mo roller coaster looping above Golden Gate’s north edge. Cyclists wheeze up and bomb down the road’s whiteboard-smooth asphalt, ping-ponging between ocean views and fog-choked inland overlooks.
When the road winds up to a vantage point, photographer Cayce Clifford motions the M2 between a bank of slablike concrete bunkers. The break allows a moment to consider the surroundings. And the car.
On California’s tightest roads, you always meet redwoods. And logging trucks.
Cayce Clifford
Before hosting BMWs, Battery Rathbone-McIndoe’s bunkers once housed six-inch rapid-fire guns to ward off the Axis powers. With wartime just an old gray memory, the Battery’s bunkers are now filled with the detritus of teenage élan: graffiti, empty forties, stray rubbers.
The M2, however, is still in its prime. It is largely updated for 2023, based on the redesigned 2-series now built in Mexico, with a 2.1-inch-longer wheelbase and wider front and rear tracks among the host of changes. Though you wouldn’t call the M2’s looks improved.
For this iteration, that gorgeous profile from the last M2 remains. But at either end of the car, BMW squared off the old M2’s elegance with a sort of Tron dystopia chic, as if its body lines were rendered in vectors and right angles.
It’s . . . well, it just looks derpy.
Does the M2’s interior pander to BMW dorks? Yes. Is it great? Also yes.
Cayce Clifford
Then again, we’ve lamented many of Munich’s visual leaps, only for hindsight to catch us like a brick to the back of the head. For all of Audi’s forward thinking and in contrast to Mercedes’s stolid evolution, BMW has stuck its Hofmeister kink above the parapet most often. By innovation or provocation, BMW is a pioneer.
With a low-speed lap of Conzelman Road complete, we rejoin Highway 101 for a blink. A few miles later, 101 splits onto historic Highway 1. At once, the road surface is smooth and immaculate. Free from the doldrum of straight-on interstate, the double-yellow two-lane rises and writhes. I back the M2’s six-speed manual down three gears in anticipation—fourth, third, second.
A quick glance at the map. Gold country again.
The section of Highway 1 from Manzanita to Muir Beach is California’s postcard. Around every corner, another reason to uproot your life and make tracks for the Golden State.
In from the ocean, where cattle graze and meadows sprawl.
Cayce Clifford
At one uphill hairpin, three-story redwoods jut into the road. A moment later, the forest thins. Out comes a valley clothed in knee-high ryegrass. A thread of mossy trees descends its draw. A stand of pink foxgloves sashay up the hillside, lit like a film set by the syrupy golden light.
On and on and on it goes, one fresh, perfect vista to the next, until a view of the blue Pacific crashes through the M2’s windshield. My attention snaps back from the daydream. I glance down at the M2’s head-up display. I’d been driving, mouth agape, five under the speed limit.
A golden road isn’t always about mainlining adrenaline, Butler explained. Sometimes it’s just beauty, flow, and harmony. The M2 fades away in these moments. Despite its 3745-pound weight, the car shifts its mass in smoothly damped motions. Its firm-but-easy steering effort combines with well-measured pedal inputs to make comfortable, easy work of any road.
Civility is a rare talent for a car that sells itself as a saw-toothed performance instrument. But it’s an essential part of the formula that built a small Bavarian firm into creators of the Ultimate Driving Machine.
California’s best secrets hide on roads jinking in from the coast at right angles.
Cayce Clifford
For that duality, we thank the M2’s civilized interior. The armrests at the driver’s elbows sit perfectly placed. With both windows wide open, there’s so little wind noise you can hear birdsong through every turn. You’re never alarmed by or inundated with excess information in the M2.
Two wide screens sit just below the driver’s view, rather than vast tablets that suffocate peripheral vision. The speedometer and tachometer are simple too, rendered on either side of the dash display and unobstructed by the steering wheel. While I still lament the loss of analog physical gauges, I admit some automakers have turned a corner with virtual displays.
From Bolinas Bay, I aim the M2 inland on the aptly named Panoramic Highway. It’s another golden gem from Butler, this time cranking up the drama and danger. The road climbs and climbs until the Pacific flattens into a single streak of cobalt along the horizon.
After stopping for photos, we slide back down the Panoramic Highway’s curves. I cruise back up the coast, windows down, smile wide. We sit in the sun on a bench adjacent to Point Reyes Station’s charming town center for lunch, with hot sandwiches and iced coffee from the Palace Market grocery deli counter. A local with no shoes and dirty feet does handstands, directing traffic with his toes.
These carbon-backed bucket seats: deeply pretty, mostly comfy, wholly unnecessary.
Cayce Clifford
Photography fills the rest of the afternoon, with the M2 reinforcing its worth as an easy cruiser. In the early evening, we execute a quick pit stop at Fort Ross Lodge, where we’re staying for the night. We leave the photo gear behind and slough off the day’s responsibility like a soggy raincoat. Then Clifford, her assistant Poppy, and I pile into the M2.
Ahead of us is a simple journey up Highway 1 to Gualala, 20-odd miles highlighted orange on the Butler map. After the day’s exhaustion, I feel like handing the reins back to GPS.
California has better ideas.
Within a few corners, the road snaps me from a daze. It snakes with a metronome’s rhythm, cambering into low swinging hairpins, then rising back up to meet views of the crashing Pacific. The M2 bares its fangs and steps into sync.
Some Butler roads are barely wide enough for a bike. Drive them anyway.
Cayce Clifford
Previous M2s, especially the hotter Competition versions, would struggle in these tight-cambered corners. I remember one hot day in Palm Springs when that old M2 Comp laid gooey black stripes down Thermal Club’s front straight through three gears.
With this update, the 2023 M2 borrows more hardware from the M4 to tame its fire-bomb engine. Upgrades include both front and rear suspension, sophisticated active dampers, a snappy e-diff, and even the M4’s 19- and 20-inch Michelin Pilot Sport 4S tires. The uprated kit works wonders.
Not to say the engine lacks potency. BMW calls it the S58. It’s a twin-snailed 3.0-liter inline-six battleship of a machine. The spec sheet claims 453 horses near the top of the tach and a churning 406 lb-ft down low. That shift to peakier power allows early throttle and steady hands through corner exit, even with electric nannies switched off.
My movements smooth to rhythmic inputs and everything else in the universe goes quiet. In one swooping blind chicane, a nervous, happy chuckle erupts from the back seat. Highway 1 delivers driving nirvana in the last place we look when we least expect it.
BMW’s S58, a 453-hp chest burster of an engine. Its turbos whoosh out 17.4 psi.
Cayce Clifford
“That’s the magic of the place,” I recall Butler saying about Northern California and its sprawling coast. “Even the roads to get to the good roads are great.”
At seven-tenths, the M2 rewards its driver more than just about any modern BMW. Beyond that, even on the drab roads GPS might lead you down, the M2 is capable of delivering joy, even encouraging it.
After a dinner of clam chowder, mussels, and a whole loaf of bread to soak up the broth, we find two teenagers camped out in the dark parking lot, hotboxing an older 3-series coupe. They’d waited hours to chat up the owner of a periwinkle BMW coupe that shattered the humdrum of their small-town lives.
The 3-series’s window rolls down.
“Hey man, that M2’s sick!” one says. “I wish I had that car.”
“Yeah, dude,” the other echoes. “That’d be, like, a dream or something.”
“You’ve got California back roads and a lifetime ahead of you, boys,” I fire back, lighting the ignition on the M2. “You’re already living it.”
Illustration by Clint Ford
Kyle KinardSenior Editor
The only member of staff to flip a grain truck on its roof, Kyle Kinard is R&T’s senior editor and resident malcontent. He lives near Seattle and enjoys the rain. His column, Kinardi Line, runs when it runs.
Keyword: The BMW M2 and a Good Map: Perfect Road Trip Companions