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.
409 km from Cortez to Cortez, about 6 h 27 of riding. The stops in between: Aztec Ruins National Monument, Halfway House and back through Aztec Ruins National Monument. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 2,450 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
On a high sandstone plateau in the south-west corner of Colorado, the Ancestral Puebloan people lived for about seven hundred years, from roughly the sixth century to the end of the thirteenth, and in the last century or so of that time they built their homes in the shelter of the cliffs. Mesa Verde, the Green Table, takes its Spanish name from the pinon and juniper that cover the mesa top. The cliff dwellings, tucked beneath overhanging rock, are among the best preserved in North America, and Cliff Palace, the biggest of them, has around a hundred and fifty rooms and many circular ceremonial chambers called kivas.
Read the complete Mesa Verde National Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Mesa Verde National Park is where the day begins. Next is Aztec Ruins National Monument.
The Aztecs never came anywhere near Aztec, New Mexico. The ruins here were named by nineteenth-century settlers who assumed, wrongly, that such impressive buildings must have been made by the famous people of central Mexico. In fact, they were built by Ancestral Puebloans between about 1100 and 1300, as part of the great Chacoan world centred on Chaco Canyon, sixty miles to the south, and they are included with Chaco in the UNESCO listing of the Chaco Culture.
Read the complete Aztec Ruins National Monument write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Aztec Ruins National Monument comes up about 140 km into the recorded legs. Next is Halfway House.
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.
about 207 km into the recorded legs you reach Halfway House. Next is back through Aztec Ruins National Monument.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Aztec Ruins National Monument write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Aztec Ruins National Monument, late in the day. Next is Mesa Verde National Park.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Mesa Verde National Park write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Mesa Verde National Park. That is the ride.
Mesa Verde National Park → Aztec Ruins National Monument is 140 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Aztec Ruins National Monument → Halfway House is 67 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Halfway House → back through Aztec Ruins National Monument is 62 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Aztec Ruins National Monument → Mesa Verde National Park is 140 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.