CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. 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.
On the way it passes Chaco Culture, Pueblo Pintado, Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C and Kin Ya'a. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 2,250 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
The Chacoans built roads that do not seem to go anywhere. From Chaco Canyon, the centre of an extraordinary culture that flourished in the San Juan Basin of north-western New Mexico around a thousand years ago, a road known as the Great North Road runs almost due north for about fifty kilometres, straight as a ruler across mesas and washes, toward Kutz Canyon. Along it stand small great houses, and the site known as Halfway House is one of them, a stone structure about halfway along the road, possibly a waystation or a ceremonial marker. Chaco Culture, including outliers like this one, was inscribed on the UNESCO list in 1987.
Read the complete Halfway House write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Halfway House is where the day begins. Next is Chaco Culture.
Getting to Chaco Canyon is part of the point. The last stretch of road into this remote corner of north-western New Mexico is unpaved, rutted and washboarded, and after rain it turns to slick mud that can make it impassable for any kind of vehicle. Take that seriously: on a road bike it is tough, and on a big touring machine it can be miserable. But the reward is extraordinary. Between roughly 850 and 1150, the Ancestral Puebloan people built monumental great houses here, multi-storey stone buildings with hundreds of rooms, aligned with the sun, moon and cardinal directions, linked by straight roads across the desert. Chaco Culture National Historical Park was listed by UNESCO in 1987.
Read the complete Chaco Culture write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chaco Culture comes up 47 km in. Next is Pueblo Pintado.
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.
Read the complete Pueblo Pintado write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
93 km in you reach Pueblo Pintado. Next is Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C.
Chaco is a place where you have to earn the silence. The way in is a long dirt road, many miles of corrugations and dust, that leaves the paved highway in the high desert of north-west New Mexico and runs across open range before dropping into a wide canyon, and by the time you arrive, you have been shaken and quiet for a good while. Then you see the walls. Between about the middle of the ninth century and the twelfth, the Ancestral Puebloan people built a dozen huge stone buildings here, called great houses, of which Pueblo Bonito is the largest, with hundreds of rooms in a D-shaped plan, stacked several storeys high, and a vast number of ceiling timbers carried in from forests far away.
Read the complete Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C, about halfway. Next is Kin Ya'a.
A broken stone tower rising out of the sagebrush is what you see first at Kin Ya'a, and it is one of the strangest sights in the Southwest. This was a Chacoan great house, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by the same Ancestral Puebloan culture that raised the monumental buildings of Chaco Canyon, some forty kilometres to the north. What makes Kin Ya'a special is its tower kiva, a round ceremonial room built up four storeys high, much of which still stands. Its name is Navajo and is usually translated as tall house. It is one of the outlying sites included in the World Heritage listing of Chaco Culture, linked to the canyon by what archaeologists believe was a formal road.
Read the complete Kin Ya'a write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Kin Ya'a sits at 187 km, about halfway. Next is back through Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C comes up 233 km in. Next is back through Pueblo Pintado.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Pueblo Pintado write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
280 km in you reach back through Pueblo Pintado. Next is back through Chaco Culture.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Chaco Culture write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Chaco Culture, late in the day. Next is Halfway House.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Halfway House write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
The route ends here after 558 km.
Halfway House → Chaco Culture is 49 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chaco Culture → Pueblo Pintado is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Pueblo Pintado → Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C → Kin Ya'a is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
Kin Ya'a → back through Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C is 61 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Chaco Culture National Historical Park - C → back through Pueblo Pintado is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Pueblo Pintado → back through Chaco Culture is 38 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.
back through Chaco Culture → Halfway House is 49 km of rhythm rather than effort. Let it flow and let the view breathe.