Goosenecks State Park

Goosenecks State Park, or Goosenecks of the San Juan as I’ve seen on some maps, is a cool place.  If I remember right I think the San Juan river flows through 5 miles of canyons in a 1 mile stretch as the crow flies. Pretty impressive, like a mini grand canyon.  It wasn’t even on our map, its just a little spur off the main road a ways.  The road is fantastic riding too, no traffic, nice pavement, and some nice sweepers.

If you look close you can see a couple of rafts down in the water, there was a lot of them.  Back in Mexican Hat there was parking-lots full of cars of all the people who had gone out rafting earlier in the day. Looks like that’s the thing to do in these parts, it looks like fun.  A good idea for something to do if we come this way again.

There’s only a lookout at the end of the road and not much to do but enjoy the view.  We were the only people there besides an Indian lady set up with a velvet covered bench selling her wares and jewelery.

I tried taking a few panoramic shots using the stitch assist feature on my Canon S5IS.  I haven’t quite gotten the hang of it and when spliced back together the horizon droops off to the right, it’d be easier with a tripod for steady footing and a fixed location.  Here’s a shot from Wikipedia that shows the canyons better than I could.

Cece was a little nervous about getting close to the edge and took a lot of encouragement to sit up on the rock railing 😉   See I told you it would make a good picture.

On to the Moki Dugway,  lots of bike videos of this on YouTube.  It’d be pretty scary if you didnt ride ski roads and stuff like this all of the time.  The worst part is the terrified cagers who go right down the center and dont give you any room.

Its all gravel and wash-boarded pretty bad in sections.   We didn’t  have any trouble going up it except for the times when we were nearly forced off the road by the cars that didn’t want to move over closer to the ledge or a few times where we were forced into some very bad washboards and ruts and were severely bounced around a bit.   Fortunately some of the tight hairpin turns did have a small patch of pavement at the apexes otherwise turning our heavy beast sharply on the loose sand would have been a bit more sketchy.

Some views of the road.

A view looking out off the cliff on the side of the road.  The dirt road in the distance going off to the left from the pavement is the Valley of the Gods Road.  I really wanted to go through that, the videos of it look amazing.  After our difficulties with the deep washboards on the Monument Valley Road though, no f’ing way!

First repair of the trip.   I snapped my speedo cable going through all the deep washboards up the Moki Dugway.  This would be a recurring theme from here on, my odometer must be 100+ miles off by now.    I bought this braided stainless steel cable off of a CCND Forum member and supposedly it was for a V Star 650 Classic.  Its a bit of a tight fit though, I think it must have been for a Custom instead, it would be better if it was a few inches longer.

Surprisingly several cars passed us while we were on the side of the road with all of the tools laid out and part of the bike apart and nobody stopped!  WTF?    That must just be a New Mexico thing, I could always trust that if I pulled over to make a phone call or was having any trouble someone would pull over to ask if I needed any help, not so here.