The water beside the road is the Red River, and it is one of the more heavily fished streams in New Mexico — there is a state fish hatchery down this canyon, and the river is stocked with rainbow trout through the season. You will see anglers at every pull-out.
There are also brown trout in here, and native Rio Grande cutthroat — New Mexico's state fish, and a species that has lost most of its historic range to stocked non-natives, habitat loss and mining pollution. There has been a long, patient effort in these headwaters to give the cutthroat streams back to it.
That mining pollution is not abstract in this drainage. The molybdenum operation above Questa left acid-generating waste rock and a tailings problem, and the Red River has carried the consequences. It is a federal cleanup site, and the work is ongoing and expensive and will run for decades.
The river is much healthier than it was. But it is a useful thing to hold in your head as we drive up a beautiful canyon: the beauty and the damage are in the same water.
Watch for American dippers along here, if you know them — small slate-grey birds that walk UNDERWATER on the stream bottom hunting insects. They are one of the great oddities of western rivers and this is good dipper habitat.
Keep climbing. Red River town is a few miles up.
Photo: Hazzard, Lloyde / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service · Public domain