Take a great break from the daily grind and join the Annual Route 666 Run!

Load up the bike and ride a couple of hours to Springerville, AZ. The 230 mile trip from Phoenix is already a spectacular one. Both the roads and the scenery are gorgeous as you climb from the desert onto the Colorado Plateau. There are cliffs, canyons and gorges along the way and the roads on the high plateau just sweep through the largest ponderosa pine forest in the US. The area provides a wide array of accommodations from campsites to luxury lodges. Get a good night’s sleep in order to start fresh in the morning. There are more than 1,000 curves to conquer the next day!

The Route 666 Run starts and ends in Springerville. Riders meet May 31st 8:30AM at the local Chamber of Commerce (381 Main Street). Don’t forget to register, so we can enter you in the drawing. At 10:00AM, after a brief chit-chat with fellow riders, reset your trip meter and leave south via Alpine Divide Pass (8525 ft) for Alpine where the common branch of US 191 and US 180 departs at 27 miles. Following US 180 fast paced sweepers and broad vistas will entertain you during a gradual descent. These are the “roads less traveled”, so don’t expect strip malls, car dealerships and gas stations to be lined up. Alma, the hideout for Butch Cassidy and his gang in the 1890’s, provides you with gas and food 80 miles from the starting point.

If you turn left onto Chase Creek Street, just a mile from the gas station, you’ll find yourself in the old business district. The historic brick buildings squeezed between a hill and a mountain creek look right out of a movie set. Turn of the century stores and banks, boarding houses and saloons are waiting for rejuvenation which makes the place even more authentic.

No wonder it seems devilish! You are riding on the once legendary Devil’s Highway, former Route 666. The first European visitor of the area was the Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, seeking the riches of the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola in 1540. His route ran close to the existing road thus the US National Scenic Byway program adopted this incredible 123 mile strip of tarmac as the Coronado Trail.

The Federal Highway Administration considers this road to be the curviest road in the nation, with 450 switchbacks and up to 1000 curves and turns in total. The rumors on the rider grapevine are true. For an incredible ride, this one is very hard to beat. It’s long, it’s twisty, it’s a roller coaster, and it’s in a wilderness setting that will thrill whatever senses you have left that the road didn’t overload. The elevation change is more than 6,000 ft from around 3,000 ft in the Sonoran Desert to over 9,000 ft in the Alpine meadows, forests and highlands.

Concentrate, brake, downshift, twist, accelerate, turn and repeat the sequence for mile after mile after mile. Sometimes you just have to pull off into a scenic rest to rest your brain because you’d soon feel as a sun-stroked snake on LSD. Most of the twisties are between Clifton and Hannagan’s Meadow (at 215 mi) but after the climb from Clifton it’s nice to sit back and enjoy the sweepers through the Ponderosa Pine Forest back into Alpine when your trip meter shows 238 mi.

Though the 27 miles back to Springerville is the same that you started the day with, riding north will provide you with such a different view that you might begin to raise doubts if you were riding in the right direction.