New Mexico

Before Red River was a ski town, before it was a tourist town, it was a mining camp — and mining camps needed schools. Around 1917, a small one-room schoolhouse rose in Red River, and for the next two decades it rang with the lessons and laughter of the town's children.

Stand on Main Street in Red River today and you will hear river water under the bridges, see visitors strolling past galleries and shops, and smell coffee drifting from the cafes. It is easy to imagine the street has always looked this inviting. It has not. One hundred and thirty years ago, this same stretch of road was the commercial heart of a raw mining boomtown that went by a different name: River City.

Most ski resorts are founded by skiers. Red River's was founded by a man who never clicked into a pair of bindings.

S.E. "Stokes" Bolton came to the Red River Valley in the 1950s with a dream but no skiing of his own. Where others saw a steep mountainside, Bolton saw a ski hill waiting to happen — a place where families could glide down the snow and be eating dinner on Main Street the same evening. The town's historians still call him what he was: the father of the Red River Valley's ski business.

It begins and ends in Taos and circles the highest mountain in New Mexico: the 84-mile Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway is northern New Mexico's grand tour, and Red River sits right on it.

The route follows four highways — U.S. 64 between Eagle Nest and Taos, NM 522 from Taos to Questa, NM 38 through Questa, Red River, and Eagle Nest, and NM 434 between Eagle Nest and Angel Fire — looping around 13,161-foot Wheeler Peak through the Carson National Forest. It was designated a National Forest Scenic Byway in 1989 and joined New Mexico's state scenic byway program in 1998.

At 13,161 feet, Wheeler Peak is the highest point in New Mexico — and the rugged country around it is among the most protected ground in the state. The 19,661-acre Wheeler Peak Wilderness, tucked into the Carson National Forest just south of Red River, became the forest's first federally designated wilderness in 1964.

Long before trout became a Red River pastime, they were a Red River product. A hatchery has stood in the valley near Questa since 1941, and today the Red River State Fish Hatchery produces about 1.7 million rainbow trout a year — more than the state's four other hatcheries combined. It is the largest production hatchery in New Mexico.

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.