The Enchanted Circle — Taos & Wheeler Peak (New Mexico)

Welcome to the Enchanted Circle — a loop of about eighty-odd miles around the highest mountain in New Mexico, through old mining towns, ski villages, and one of the most affecting memorials in America. I'm Ranger Quin…

Taos, where we start, is three communities layered on the same ground, and it is worth being clear about them. There is Taos Pueblo — a Native community that has been continuously inhabited for something like a thous…

Coming up on your right is the junction with Highway One Fifty, signed for Arroyo Seco and Taos Ski Valley. We are NOT taking it — stay straight on Five Twenty-Two — but it is worth knowing what is up there. That roa…

Right — the ski valley up that canyon. Let me tell you about the man who made it, because his life reads like somebody made it up. He was born in Frankfurt in nineteen thirteen, and his name was Ernst Hermann Bloch.…

As we run north out of Taos, look at the small green fields either side of the road, and the ditches feeding them. Those ditches are acequias, and they are one of the oldest continuously operating institutions in the…

The village of Arroyo Hondo is off to the left here, down in its valley — an old Hispano settlement that in the late nineteen sixties became something nobody planned for. In nineteen sixty-seven, a commune called New…

The range on your right is the Sangre de Cristo — the Blood of Christ mountains — and it is the southern end of the Rocky Mountains, running out of Colorado and dying away south of Santa Fe. The name comes from the l…

This stretch has one of the most abrupt ecological gradients on the loop, and it is worth a minute of attention, because you are about to leave it behind. Out west of us it is high desert — sagebrush, rabbitbrush, ch…

All right, here is a genuine unsolved mystery, and I like it because nobody has ever explained it and it is still going on right now, a few miles from where you are sitting. In the early nineteen nineties, people aro…

Off to your west, out across the sagebrush plain, the ground simply opens up — that is the Rio Grande Gorge, and it is one of the more dramatic things in the state. The river has cut a slot six or seven hundred feet…

Somewhere up the slope to your right, above the village of San Cristobal, is a small ranch that has an improbable place in English literature. The writer D.H. Lawrence — author of Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and…

Now pull up a seat, because there is a small white building up on the mountain behind you with an English novelist in it, and how he got there is one of the stranger journeys I know of. David Herbert Lawrence was a c…

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 generation…

Here is your first real navigational moment, so listen up. Coming into Questa, Highway Five Twenty-Two ends at a junction with State Road Thirty-Eight. **You want to turn RIGHT onto Thirty-Eight, signed for Red River…

West of us here is the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, and the piece of it closest to this road is called Wild Rivers — the place where the Red River comes in and joins the Rio Grande, both of them eight hundr…

You have just left the plain and entered the Red River canyon, and it is one of the more abrupt transitions on this loop. Sagebrush and open sky one minute; steep walls, running water and evergreens the next. The roa…

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 sea…

While we climb, let me give you the seasons on this loop, because the Enchanted Circle is genuinely four different drives depending on when you show up. AUTUMN is the famous one. Late September into the first week or…

This is Red River — eighty-seven hundred feet, a single main street, and a ski mountain rising directly behind the shops. It is one of the most compact and likeable mountain towns in the Southwest. The mining came fi…

Let me tell you how the gold got found up here, because it involves a wounded man, a piece of rock, and about seven thousand people who did not know what they were getting into. The story goes that in the eighteen si…

Those white-trunked trees running in bands up the mountainsides are quaking aspen, and they are the reason several hundred thousand people drive this loop every autumn. The leaves are on flattened stalks, which is wh…

You are near the top of Bobcat Pass, and at about ninety-eight hundred and twenty feet this is the highest point on the Enchanted Circle. The air up here has roughly two thirds the oxygen of sea level, which you may n…

You are driving through some of the best elk habitat in the Southwest right now, and if you are here in September, you may get one of the great wildlife experiences in North America. Rocky Mountain elk are big — a bu…

Down the valley on your left are the remains of Elizabethtown — E-town, as everyone calls it — and it is New Mexico's most complete boom-and-bust story. The gold was found around eighteen sixty-six. Within four years…

I told you this one was dark. If you have got young ones listening, this is your moment to skip ahead a few minutes. I'll wait. Still here? All right. In eighteen seventy, on the road between Elizabethtown and Taos…

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 d…

Second navigational moment, and this one is easy to miss because the village is small and you are looking at the lake. In Eagle Nest, State Road Thirty-Eight ends at US Highway Sixty-Four. **You want to turn RIGHT on…

The open grassland running along this valley is ranch country, and it has been for well over a century — which makes it, in local terms, the steady business. Mining boomed and vanished. Skiing came late. Cattle have b…

Somewhere in the mass of mountains on your right is Wheeler Peak: thirteen thousand one hundred and sixty-one feet, the highest point in the state of New Mexico. This whole loop is a lap around it, and it hides well —…

On the hillside ahead on your right, you will see a white shape that does not look like anything else in this landscape — a tall, curved, sail-like wall rising off the ridge. That is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Stat…

I want to tell you this one carefully, because it is true in every particular and it does not need any help from me. On the twenty-second of May, nineteen sixty-eight, at a place in Vietnam called Con Thien — just be…

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. Whe…

You are in the middle of the switchbacks now, climbing toward the pass — still on Sixty-Four, still no turns to make. While you work your way up, here is the thing most likely to actually affect your day. You are hig…

You are climbing again — this is Palo Flechado Pass, about ninety-one hundred feet, and it is the last high point of the loop before the long descent into Taos. The name is Spanish and it means, roughly, the tree stu…

We are coming down the road that history came up, so let me tell you what happened at the end of it in the winter of eighteen forty-seven. It is not a comfortable story and it is one that Taos still carries. Set the…

You are in Taos Canyon now, following the Rio Fernando de Taos down toward town, and this is the gentlest, prettiest stretch of the whole circle — a stream on one side, pines and cottonwoods, cabins and small gallerie…

The canyon has opened out and you are coming back into Taos, which closes the circle. Whatever the odometer says, you have been around the highest mountain in New Mexico. A few things worth doing now that you are bac…

Practical and important: you are in one of the best regional food cultures in the United States, and it would be a shame to drive through it eating gas-station sandwiches. Northern New Mexican food is its own thing.…

One last recommendation before we let you go, and it costs nothing. Northern New Mexico has some of the darkest skies left in the United States. There is very little population up here, very little light, the elevati…

That is the Enchanted Circle. Thank you for spending the drive with us — genuinely, thank you for letting us ride along. Look at what fits inside eighty-odd miles. A thousand-year-old Pueblo and a resort built in the…