Red River New Mexico

Long before Red River had a chairlift, a young couple down the Rio Pueblo valley near Vadito was already hauling skiers uphill with a rope. In 1952, Lloyd and Olive Bolander opened Sipapu, and with it, New Mexico got its first lift-served ski area — a small, family-built hill that has stayed family in spirit ever since.

Every gold rush has the miners who swing the picks, and then it has the man who owns the ground under their boots. For the rush that swept the mountains around Baldy Peak and Elizabethtown, at the edge of Red River's own mining country, that man was Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, once the largest private landowner in United States history.

Red River's second founding did not ride in with a gold pan. It arrived in 1936 with a family looking for a living. L.S. Lewis brought his wife Jessie and their children Clifton, Evelyn and five-year-old Lester to the west end of the valley, and bought 110 acres that stretched from what is now River Ranch toward the Black Mountain Playhouse on Pioneer Road.

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.

Some Red River stories begin with a gold strike. This one begins with a honeymoon. John and Judy Miller honeymooned in Red River in 1957 and decided to move there in 1963. John went to work as assistant manager at Red River Ski Area and, with four children to feed, also took a job at the molybdenum mine down the road. Skiing was not a side interest for the Millers. It became the work of their lives.

Drive east from Questa toward Red River and you pass a side canyon most visitors never name: Sulphur Gulch, a tributary of the Red River. For years, prospectors who noticed the soft black mineral and the earthy yellow material along the gulch assumed they were looking at graphite and sulfur, and walked on. In 1916 they learned better. The black mineral was molybdenite and the yellow coating was ferrimolybdite, and Sulphur Gulch held molybdenum, a metal valued for hardening steel.

Most drives around the Enchanted Circle are about the scenery, and the scenery earns it: an 84-mile loop around Wheeler Peak, at 13,161 feet the tallest mountain in New Mexico, linking Taos, Questa, Red River, Eagle Nest and Angel Fire. But on a hillside above Angel Fire, overlooking the Moreno Valley, the Circle holds something quieter than a ski slope or a mining camp. It holds the first major memorial built in the United States to honor Vietnam War veterans.

Every mountain town has one dining room that feels like it has always been there, and on Red River's Main Street that room belongs to Texas Reds Steakhouse. The restaurant dates its start to Thanksgiving 1967, and its own description of the formula has barely changed since: the best and freshest food it can serve, at a reasonable price, with generous portions of friendly service and an old west atmosphere. In a town built first on mining and then on welcoming visitors, Texas Reds became one of the fixed points of an evening on Main Street.

Just west of Red River, generations of beginners learned to ski on a small, friendly hill with a name that promised no intimidation: Powder Puff Mountain. It was never the biggest ski area in the Enchanted Circle, and that was exactly the point. Powder Puff specialized in first-timers, children and families, and for nearly two decades it gave Red River a second, gentler front door to winter.

Drive south from Red River on the Enchanted Circle, through the Moreno Valley toward Cimarron, and you are crossing Clay Allison country. In the 1870s, Colfax County was Red River's rough backyard, a land of gold camps, big ranches and land-grant feuds, and no name from those years has gathered more stories, true and tall, than Robert Clay Allison.