Hovenweep is the kind of place you reach by deciding to, because nothing else lies along the way. The monument sits on the Utah and Colorado line out on a quiet, dry plateau, and the nearest settlement of any size on the Colorado side is Towaoc, thirty-odd kilometres off. The road in rolls over sage flats and slickrock edges with almost no traffic, and in the late afternoon you can ride for a long time without seeing another vehicle. That emptiness is half the charm and also the warning: fill up before you leave Cortez or Blanding, carry water, and assume your phone will have given up.
The towers are what you come for. Ancestral Puebloans built clusters of square, round and D-shaped stone towers on the rims of small canyons here in the 1200s, and nobody is entirely sure what they were for. Granaries, lookouts, ceremonial rooms, a way of guarding a spring, all have been argued. The walls still stand to a startling height, fitted with a care that makes the ruins feel recent rather than ancient. Square Tower Group, near the visitor area, is the easiest to walk around and the one with the clearest sense of a village perched above a drainage. It was protected as a national monument in 1923.
The land around is high desert in the proper sense. Expect big sky, a fine dusting of red dirt, ravens, and in warm months lizards that sprint across the tarmac. Spring and autumn are comfortable; midsummer can be fierce by midday, and winter nights go well below freezing. Because the lights are so far away, the monument has a reputation for dark skies, and if your plans allow an overnight in Blanding or Cortez, the stars from here are the kind you remember.
Ride it slowly. The surface is generally fine but the junctions are few and the shoulders soft, and cattle can wander out onto open range. You are on the Trail of the Ancients here, and unlike its busier neighbour Mesa Verde, the story is told mostly by silence and masonry. Bring a camera, bring a spare bottle of water, and give the towers a full hour.