Pueblo Pintado stands in the high desert of northwestern New Mexico, on Navajo land, and it is the easternmost of the great houses connected to Chaco Canyon. Around a thousand years ago the people we call Ancestral Puebloans raised masonry walls here, several storeys tall, laying thin sandstone into patterns that still look careful today. The ruin has been roughened by weather, but the arrangement of rooms, the circular kivas and the long arc of the building are clear, and you can walk around it on a short trail.
The land is what you notice first. It is big, tawny country of mesas, arroyos, sagebrush and piñon-juniper, with a sky that does a lot of the talking. Wind is nearly constant, and storms in July and August arrive with walls of rain, so check the clouds before you set off. The Chaco world was linked by roads, including the Great North Road, and Kin Ya'a and Casamero, other outlier sites on this route, were parts of the same network, set along lines that only make sense when you have seen the distances.
Riding here is open and a little lonely. The paved highways, long and straight with the occasional smooth bend, carry little traffic and plenty of space, and the Navajo Nation roads that spur off toward the ruins can switch to rough dirt that turns to glue after rain. Distances are huge and services thin. Fuel is limited to small towns and trading posts, so fill up before you go, with the nearest bigger centres in Farmington to the north and Cuba or Bernalillo in the east and south.
Respect matters here. This is the Navajo Nation, so follow local rules about where you may walk and photograph, and treat the ruins, which are fragile, as you would a cemetery. Come in spring or fall, when daytime temperatures are mild and the light on the sandstone turns amber at either end of the day. Winter brings snow and mud, and midsummer afternoons are hot and thundery.