Enchanted Circle

High on the eastern slope of Baldy Peak, at more than 10,000 feet in Colfax County, sat one of the richest small gold mines in New Mexico history. The Aztec Mine, on the Maxwell Land Grant, did not begin as a gold mine at all. It began with copper, and a chance conversation at Fort Union.

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.

Every mountain town has a room where the night comes together — and in Red River, for generations, that room has been the Motherlode. At 406 Main Street, the saloon with the big stage, the big dance floor, the pool tables in the back, and the front porch for watching the evening go by has been the town's honky-tonk through every era of its modern life.

Ask most people about the Red River gold rush and they'll name Elizabethtown, the great Baldy Mountain camp that drew thousands in 1866. But the gold didn't stop at E-Town. In the narrow, heavily forested valleys around Red River itself — along Bitter Creek, Placer Creek, Gold Hill, and the little camps of Anchor and La Belle — a quieter generation of miners worked smaller placers for decades, and their story survived in government surveys and, remarkably, in the ground itself.

It looms over the Enchanted Circle at 13,167 feet — the highest natural point in New Mexico, the rooftop of the state, visible from Red River, Eagle Nest, and Taos alike. For most of its known history it was called Taos Peak, after the town to its west. Then, in 1950, it was renamed for a man who never lived in New Mexico but mapped it: Major George Montague Wheeler.

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.

Twenty-five miles north of Taos, in the center of the village of Questa, stands an adobe church that has been testing its community's devotion for nearly two centuries. San Antonio de Padua — Saint Anthony of Padua — anchors a parish whose roots reach back to the first years of the settlement the Spanish called San Antonio del Rio Colorado.

In the early 1950s, Ernie Blake had an unusual commute. The Swiss-German skier was managing the Santa Fe Ski Basin and a sister resort in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, and rather than driving between them, he flew his own Cessna 170 — about six hours of driving saved each way. But the flights gave him something better than time: a bird's-eye view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and a growing obsession with finding the perfect mountain for a ski area of his own.

Just east of the Taos Plaza, on a quiet stretch of Kit Carson Road, stands a modest single-story adobe house — and few buildings in New Mexico have sheltered a bigger life. Built in 1825 in the Spanish Colonial style, an east-facing U wrapped around a central courtyard, the house was purchased in 1843 by frontiersman Kit Carson as a wedding gift for his young bride, María Josefa Jaramillo.

On May 22, 1968, Marine First Lieutenant David Westphall was killed in an ambush near Con Thien in Vietnam. He was twenty-eight years old. Back home on their ranch near Angel Fire, New Mexico, his parents, Dr. Victor "Doc" Westphall and his wife Jeanne, made a decision that would reshape how America remembers the Vietnam War: they would build a memorial to their son and his fallen comrades, using David's military life insurance to pay for it.