CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Santa Fe it runs 126 km to Taos; allow about 2 h 27 of riding. On the way it passes Chimayo, Truchas, Las Trampas and Ranchos de Taos. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 2,800 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For about 15 km this is High Road to Taos, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Route 66 used to go to Santa Fe, and then in 1937 it did not. The original alignment of the Mother Road ran over Glorieta Pass into the old Spanish capital of New Mexico, before dropping south to Albuquerque, and then engineers cut a straight line across the desert from Santa Rosa to Albuquerque, shaving about a hundred miles off the journey and leaving Santa Fe on a bypassed loop. The ride from Amarillo to Santa Fe follows that early route, and this is the end of it, in a city at about seven thousand feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
Read the complete Santa Fe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Santa Fe is where the day begins. Next is Chimayo.
Chimayo is a village in a fold of the high desert foothills of northern New Mexico, at about 1,800 metres, and it holds one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the United States. The Santuario de Chimayo, a small adobe church completed in 1816, stands in a courtyard shaded by cottonwoods, with twin bell towers and a simple, dignified interior. Inside a side room, a small hole in the floor, the pocito, contains soft earth said to have healing properties, and every year tens of thousands of pilgrims come, many on foot, to take a pinch of the soil, with the greatest numbers on Good Friday.
Read the complete Chimayo write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chimayo comes up about 46 km into the recorded legs. Next is Truchas.
Truchas clings to a ridge at around eight thousand feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and from its edge the land drops away westward toward the Rio Grande valley in a vast spread of mesa and desert. Behind it the Truchas Peaks rise to over thirteen thousand feet. The name is Spanish for trout, from the streams that run off the mountains, and the village has a sense of being at the end of something, which in a way it is.
Read the complete Truchas write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 61 km into the recorded legs you reach Truchas. Next is Las Trampas.
Las Trampas is a village that is easy to ride through and very much worth stopping in. Its centrepiece is the church of San Jose de Gracia, a big adobe building with twin bell towers, built in the second half of the eighteenth century and still in use. It is regarded as one of the best-preserved Spanish colonial churches in the United States, and the simplicity of the building, with its thick walls, wooden beams, and carved details, has a power that more elaborate churches often lack.
Read the complete Las Trampas write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Las Trampas, about halfway. Next is Ranchos de Taos.
The church at Ranchos de Taos is one of the most photographed buildings in the American Southwest, and it deserves it. San Francisco de Asis is an adobe mission with massive buttresses, rounded and sculptural, that seem to flow out of the ground. Georgia O'Keeffe painted it several times, Ansel Adams photographed it, and generations of artists have tried to get its shape right. Every year or so, the community re-plasters it with fresh mud in a tradition that goes back generations, so what you see is partly the work of recent hands.
Read the complete Ranchos de Taos write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Ranchos de Taos sits at 164 km, late in the day. Next is Taos.
Taos is a small town with a big reputation among painters, writers and people who came for a visit and stayed. It lies at about 7,000 feet on a high plateau at the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, with the dark ridge of the range rising to the east and the dry sagebrush plain dropping to the Rio Grande gorge to the west. The light is extraordinary, clear and golden, and early in the twentieth century it drew a group of artists, the Taos Society of Artists, who painted the landscape and the people. D. H. Lawrence also lived near here for a time in the 1920s, and his ranch can be visited.
Read the complete Taos write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 126 km.
Santa Fe → Chimayo is 46 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chimayo → Truchas is 15 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Truchas → Las Trampas is 13 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Las Trampas → Ranchos de Taos is 45 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Ranchos de Taos → Taos is 7 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.