The Moreno Valley opens up in front of you now, and that sheet of water is Eagle Nest Lake — a state park, about twenty-four hundred surface acres, sitting at eighty-two hundred feet with Wheeler Peak and the Sangre de Cristo standing behind it.
It is not natural. The dam went in around nineteen eighteen, built privately by ranching interests to store irrigation water for the Cimarron country downstream — which was an ambitious piece of engineering for a private outfit in this era and this terrain. It became a state park in two thousand and four.
Today it is a fishing and boating lake — trout and kokanee salmon, and in winter, ice fishing, which at this elevation is a serious hobby for serious people.
The valley itself is worth looking at. It is a high, broad, treeless grassland ringed by forested mountains, and it holds cold air; some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded in New Mexico have come out of this valley and the ones near it. It is also excellent wildlife ground — elk herds winter down here in numbers, there are pronghorn, and the lake pulls in osprey and bald eagles.
The village of Eagle Nest is small, friendly and has fuel — worth noting, because it is the last easy stop before we turn south.
Ahead, we turn right onto US Sixty-Four toward Angel Fire — and toward the most moving place on this loop.
Photo: Billy Hathorn at en.wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0