Best New Trips in the World: Bike and Camp in Colorado's Hovenweep National Monument

For our annual Adventure Travel issue, we scoured the globe to find the 25 Best New Trips in the World for 2010, complete with a Best Trips photo gallery. Today, we present Colorado. The world's far corners are now well within reach.

COLORADO: Alone With the Ancients

More than six million tourists flocked to the Four Corners region in 2008, making a beeline for the sandstone rock formations and ancestral Puebloan dwellings at places like Arches National Park and Mesa Verde. Hovenweep National Monument, meanwhile, saw just 25,411 visitors. “Hovenweep’s one of the more remote areas left in the country,” says Western Spirit Cycling president Ashley Korenblat. This spring Korenblat’s Moab-based outfit will lead the first commercial biking trip to the monument, which lies some 70 miles east of Cortez, Colorado, at the end of a circuitous country road. Once a major center for the ancestral Puebloans, Hovenweep’s sprawling collection of ruins doubles as a giant outdoor classroom for Native American history buffs. The trip is a kid-friendly affair, with interactive workshops along with double- and singletrack cruising.

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Comments

[donna]

A much shorter route is to take Highway 491 north out of Cortez approximately 20 miles and going west on Road BB directly to Hovenweep, which, by the way, is WEST of Cortez. This route is only 42 miles, versus the 70 mile route as stated in the article.