Questa is a village with a long Hispano history and a complicated recent one, and it is worth the honest version.
It sits where the mountains meet the plain, and it was a farming and ranching community for generations. Then molybdenum was found in the mountains behind it — moly is the metal that makes steel harder and heat-resistant, and it is essential to a modern industrial economy.
A large mine operated up that canyon for decades, and it did what mines do to a small town: it brought good wages and it brought dependence. Generations of families worked it.
It closed in twenty-fourteen. And the effect on a village of this size when the single largest employer stops is not abstract — it is young people leaving, houses emptying, and a community working hard to find what comes next. There is also a long environmental cleanup underway up that canyon.
You will see the scars on the mountainside as we turn east. I would rather point them out than drive past pretending everything here is scenery.
Questa is still here, and it is finding its footing on tourism, art and the outdoors — which is exactly what this road brings through it.
Photo: Irving Rusinow · Public domain