Day 12 (Fri, 28 Mar)

I rode from the tiny town of Datil, NM (50 residents) to Socorro, NM (a little bit bigger!) today.  This was a fun ride with some climbing (500 ft) but mainly flats and downhill coming out of the mountains into the Rio Grande basin (1,500 ft drop in just the last few miles into the basin).  The ride was 63 miles, completely on US Hwy 60 again.  About 1/3 of the way into the ride I realized I had a good chance of doing 60+ miles at 20+ mph (I tried that last year but came up just short at 19.8 mph); I went for it and did 20.5 average mph over 63 miles – awesome fun!   The weather was cold again in the morning starting at about 40 F, but as I went down below 6,000 and 5,000 ft elevation the temps rose into the 70s.  Completely sunny today.  There was a mild 5-10 mph wind for much of the day out of the NW and then North, so primarily tailwinds and then crosswinds and a bit of head winds at the end of the ride.

For cyclists: Hwy 60 on this stretch worked ok again for the ride.  The pavement varied from bad to ok to great.  The main issue was that there was no riding lane for most of the ride; offsetting that was generally very little traffic (almost no one lives in the area and this is definitely not a trucking route). 

Check out the pictures for the story of the ride – some really cool stuff today!

Very unique geographic feature (I'm not aware of anything else similar in the US) - a huge, basically flat (within 200 ft across 20 miles) plain in the middle of the mountains.  More on the Plains of San Agustin here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_of_San_Agustin.

As long as we have such a flat, high elevation plain (at over 6,000 ft elevation), we might as well put it to good use!  Check the next few pictures and video out!  This is the National Radio Astronomy Observatory "Very Large Array" that is 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration that acts as 1 antenna to map/take pictures of deep space.  More info here on this array and others they operate across the US and World: http://www.vla.nrao.edu.

Close up!

Bike taking a rest - there is a visitor's building on the site but its 4 miles off Hwy 60 so I wasn't able to visit it.

Flat landscape!

Short video of the VLA and Plains - check it out!

Climbing up out of the plains toward the San Mateo Mountains.

The one town between Datil and Socorro - it seems that just about every town in NM was founded based on one of 3 things: 1) near a river (there aren't many...), 2) near a good ranching area, or 3) Silver was found in the area.  

The North and South Baldy mountain peaks east of Magdalena.  Hwy 60 goes right around them to the North - fun ride bypassing right around the mountains!

You'll have to zoom in on the picture to see this but this is at the upper edge (maybe about 2,000 ft about it) of the Rio Grande River basin just before I started the primary descent into the valley to Socorro.

A little history of the town - settled initially in the early 1600's.

Mountains to the west of Socorro.

Home for the night!