Ghost Towns

Every gold rush runs on two things: gold, and water to wash it free. Around Baldy Mountain in 1867, northern New Mexico had plenty of the first and nowhere near enough of the second. Prospectors who had flocked to the Moreno Valley after the October 1866 gold find on Willow Creek could work their placer claims only while snowmelt and spring rain kept the creeks running. By late spring most gulches dried up, and rich gravel sat idle while miners waited on the weather.

Drive northeast out of Red River toward Bitter Creek and you climb into country that once held two gold camps almost nobody remembers. Their names were Midnight and Anchor, and together they lasted about as long as a good pair of boots.

Follow the Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway around its 84-mile loop of the high Sangre de Cristos and you will pass through some of the most storied ground in northern New Mexico. Few travelers realize that at one stop on that loop, the whole town is standing on a ghost town.

In 1869, the brand-new Colfax County made the gold-rush boomtown of Elizabethtown its first county seat — a town that had been New Mexico's first incorporated municipality, founded three years earlier by Captain William H. Moore. The county seat would move to Cimarron in 1872, but the land war that followed it would rage for another decade and a half, and it would reach right to Red River's doorstep.

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.

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.

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.