Red River Tales

For four decades, Memorial Day weekend meant one thing in Red River: thunder. The Red River Memorial Day Motorcycle Rally — one of the oldest in the nation — drew tens of thousands of bikers to Main Street and kicked off the town's summer season with a roar.

Before the ski lifts and the motorcycles, Red River was River City — a rowdy gold camp perched at 8,750 feet in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Oral history says the town was founded on July 3, 1895, by Colorado miner Edward I. Jones and the Red River City Town and Mineral Company. It took its name from the stream running through it, which turns red with silt after heavy rains.

When Oklahoma oil man Stokes Bolton rolled into Red River in the 1950s, the town counted barely a dozen year-round residents. He had never skied a run in his life. What he had was an entrepreneur's eye: the steep, snowy slopes rising above town looked like a business waiting to happen. In 1959 he opened the Red River Ski and Summer Area with a rope tow, a poma platter lift, and a chairlift cobbled together from salvaged oil derricks — and a ski town was born.

Eight miles northeast of Red River, up a mountain road that climbs into the hills, lies the ghost town of La Belle. Not much is left but the memory of a boomtown and, if the legends are true, outlaw gold buried somewhere in the hills around it.

Long before Red River was a town, the valley belonged to hunters and herders. Utes and Jicarillas chased elk and bighorn sheep across the high meadows, and sheepherders from Questa, Costilla, and Taos grazed their flocks where Main Street runs today. Prospectors drifted through in the 1870s and found the silence of the valley restful — and kept drifting, because the great strikes were all over in Elizabethtown. Then came three French-Canadian trappers with gold pans.

In the fall of 1866, a Ute Indian walked into Fort Union carrying a handful of “pretty rocks” — copper ore — and asked to trade them for winter supplies. The man behind the sutler’s store counter, retired Captain William H. Moore, recognized copper when he saw it and struck a deal to be led to its source. What followed built a town — and then quietly unbuilt it.