Red River New Mexico

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.

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.