Silver City is the kind of place that makes people wonder why they did not find it sooner. It sits at about 5,900 feet on the edge of the Gila country in southwest New Mexico, a few miles from the Continental Divide, and its brick downtown still carries the mark of the mining boom that created it in the 1870s. A flood in the 1890s carved out the main street into a ravine, and the Big Ditch park now runs where Main Street once was, which is one of those local facts that stops visitors in the middle of the pavement.
The town's story is wide. Billy the Kid spent part of his boyhood here, and the nearby Santa Rita pit, one of the oldest copper mines in the Southwest, still scars the hills to the east in a vast terraced bowl you can look into from a viewpoint on Highway 152. Pinos Altos, a short ride north, keeps its false-front saloon and old gold camp mood. The university adds a student presence, and the arts scene gives the town better coffee than its size suggests.
The riding is the reason to come. Highway 15 climbs north from Pinos Altos through ponderosa and then threads a long, tight series of bends across ridge after ridge toward the Gila Cliff Dwellings, where the Mogollon people built rooms into cave alcoves in the late thirteenth century. It is slow, narrow and tiring, a thorough two-hour piece of work each way, with no real shoulder and very little traffic. Highway 152 to the east crosses the Black Range through Emory Pass, a high pass with wide views and plenty of hairpins. Elevation keeps the summer manageable, but monsoon storms in July and August are fierce and often arrive after lunch.
Silver City has every service a rider needs, including fuel and a handful of good places to eat, and it is the last real stock-up before the wilder roads. Once you head north into the Gila National Forest the stations are few, the phone signal is patchy and the nearest sizable repair shop is back here. Fill the tank, carry water, and leave early.