The High Road To Taos
The gorge of the Rio Grande about 10 miles west of Taos is well worth a visit once you get that far.
Getting you from one place to another is only a small part of what makes for a great motorcycle road. More importantly, a great motorcycle road twists and winds, climbs and descends, allows you to take your time, and offers a fresh experience that affords numerous interesting stops.
Check, check, and check. Add the High Road to Taos to your list of top two-wheel routes.
The “Low Road” to Taos is the main one, and it’s a busy highway that mostly follows the Rio Grande Valley. The High Road is small and quiet and offers a taste of Southwestern culture that can make you feel like you’re gone to another country. Unfortunately, until recently that culture also included the Third World mentality that “the world is my trash heap,” but an aggressive anti-litter campaign appears to have turned that attitude around.
Starting out from the general vicinity of Espanola, northwest of Santa Fe a few miles, the High Road at first passes through small communities that afford a glimpse of life in this region before the advent of electricity and technology. Homes are hidden deep in the shade of towering trees that keep the otherwise oppressive heat and vicious sunshine at bay, offering a coolness that is delicious in its relief.
The road then rises to the brown, arid hilltops, riding a ridge line that passes above the lush green farming valleys of towns with names such as Rio Chiquito and Cordova. The architecture gives a sense of place that is lost in the ticky-tacky sameness of modern housing developments.
Approaching the small community of Truchas a cemetery alongside the road displays a colorful aspect more common south of the border than north, including one grave site flanked on both sides by sheet metal cutouts of the V-twin hog the deceased once presumably loved.
On through Ojo Sarco, Las Trampas, and Chamisal, the road – NM 76 – winds until it ends at NM 75 near Rio Lucio. East through Penasco and beyond you follow a river canyon, and then at Rock Wall a left turn of about 160 degrees puts you on NM 518, where you start to climb and then climb some more.
Now the road earns its title of the High Road to Taos. Coursing high through the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the vegetation is dense pine and spruce forest and the vistas, when they present themselves, are of neighboring mountains and the deep valleys in between. Then you descend into one of those valleys and soon encounter the congestion and fast-food franchises that make the outskirts of Taos indistinguishable from any other American city.
Biker Quote for Today
I want to take you on a motorcycle ride through the sugar cane and the countryside — Michael Franti
Tags: High Road to Taos
