Mark Boster / Los Angeles TimesCross country bicyclists pedal through Death Valley National Park on their way to Beatty, Nevada.

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK — By the time I met Wolfgang Steffens, he had already spent about two years on the road. Since leaving his home in Finland, he had covered big chunks of Europe and Africa on a BMW motorcycle with a sidecar. Road name: Silver Wolf.

In other words, Steffens, 49, had seen a lot and survived plenty of scrapes. Now he was in the outback area of Death Valley known as the Racetrack, tiptoeing from rock to rock with a camera.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Death Valley,” he said. “And I read that there was a cool rock thing here.”

Before taking to the road, Steffens worked as an electrical engineer. Since August 2012, he and his wife, Ilta, and their dogs have been slowly circling the world on two motorcycles (and sidecar), having adventures, promoting veganism and blogging (www.sauerkraut-tofuwurst.com).

In short, they are vegan biker bloggers. Their plan is to spend five years on the road, Steffens said, “unless we run out of money.”

With the three dogs bouncing along in the sidecar, they had covered 30 countries in Europe and Africa, then shipped the bikes to North America. Here, they’d been happily surprised by American hospitality — “people invite you to their house!” — and saddened by the loss of their eldest dog. Hertta, a 14-year-old poodle mix, died in the Pacific Northwest.

Now they were headed to Latin America. Because his wife didn’t like the look of Death Valley’s back roads, Steffens had a day to explore on his own. The sun was sinking, and it was time to drive out. We said our goodbyes.

But an hour later, photographer Mark Boster and I found Steffens by the side of the road, mournfully perched on his idle bike. The rocky route had cracked its front fork and partly collapsed its frame. He couldn’t steer, 13 miles from the nearest blacktop.

“Luckily,” Steffens told us, “there was no ditch.” Otherwise, he was very quiet. “Devastated,” he said later.

We unloaded his bike, nudged it closer to the edge of the road, put his gear in our Jeep and took him to his wife and dogs at the Furnace Creek campsite. By the time Steffens thanked us once more and waved goodbye, it was fully dark. The more Boster and I imagined the time and money it would take to get them rolling again, the sadder we got.

But apparently you can’t keep a vegan biker down, especially one with mechanical aptitude and friends in Las Vegas.

By the next afternoon, a Vegas friend with a truck was towing the Silver Wolf to civilization. Within about a week, Steffens told me later by email, the bike and sidecar were rolling again. They spent New Year’s Eve at Lake Havasu.

It would take several more weeks to fix deeper issues with the bent sub-frame and leaking rear shock absorber. By the end of January, Steffens wrote me, he expected to be in Phoenix, where they could “prepare the bikes and ourselves to steer toward Central and South America.”