Navajo speakers call it Kin Nizhoni, which means beautiful house, and the name has outlived the walls. This is one of the Chacoan outliers, a village of stone-and-mud buildings put up about a thousand years ago by Ancestral Puebloan people who were linked to the great centre at Chaco Canyon, some distance to the north. The outliers sit scattered across the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, often connected to Chaco by straight prehistoric roads, and each tells a piece of the story of a society that traded turquoise, pottery and macaw feathers across a very large area.
What you see today is low and quiet, with eroded walls and rubble mounds in sagebrush and juniper country. It rewards a slow look rather than a quick photograph. The landscape here is the Colorado Plateau edge, dry and bright, with Mount Taylor rising to the north, a mountain sacred to the Navajo and several Pueblo peoples, and the black lava flows of El Malpais lying to the south. The air is dry, the sky enormous, and in the evening the sandstone glows orange and red.
Riding in this part of New Mexico is easy and long. Interstate 40 and the old Route 66 run along the corridor, with fast, open roads, strong crosswinds and endless horizons, while the side roads to the outlier are narrower and sometimes unpaved. Monsoon storms between July and September can bring sudden downpours, hail and flash floods in arroyos, and the dirt tracks can become impassable after rain. Spring is windy, summer hot at midday, and autumn is the best season, with crisp air and golden cottonwoods in the valleys. Winter brings snow and ice at this elevation, so check conditions.
Grants, about twenty-five kilometres away, is the nearest town of any size, with fuel, motels, cafés and a mining museum, and Milan is closer and smaller. Fill up before leaving town, carry water, and be aware that there is little shade at the site. Treat the ruins with respect, stay on marked paths, and take only photographs, because the stones are fragile and sacred to descendants who still live in the region.