Angel Fire

Angel Fire is the resort community on your left — a ski mountain, a golf course, a lake, and a village that essentially did not exist before the nineteen sixties.

This is the newest thing on the Enchanted Circle. Where Red River and Elizabethtown were mining camps that reinvented themselves or died, Angel Fire was purpose-built as a resort on ranch land, and it has been growing ever since.

The name is the good part. It is one of those names with several competing origin stories, and the one people here like best holds that it comes from the Moache Ute, who wintered in this valley, and from the fire-coloured light that comes off these slopes at sunrise and sunset — the same alpenglow that gave the Sangre de Cristo their name. Missionaries are said to have rendered it as the fire of the angels. Whether that is the true etymology or a very good piece of resort-era marketing depends on which local historian you ask, and both will tell you with total confidence.

The skiing here is genuinely good — it has the most lift-served terrain in New Mexico — and it runs a serious summer operation too: mountain biking on the lifts, zip lines, and a golf course at eighty-five hundred feet where the ball flies noticeably farther in the thin air.

Stay on Sixty-Four here — you do not turn anywhere in Angel Fire. Past the village the highway leaves the valley floor and starts to climb, and for the next six or seven miles it works uphill in a long series of switchbacks and sweeping bends. There are no junctions in any of it; whatever the road does, follow it. Just keep to your own lane on the blind curves, because the centre line gets wandered over up here, and expect to come up behind a slow truck at least once. We are heading for Palo Flechado Pass and then down into Taos Canyon.