Enchanted Circle and Cimarron Canyon Loop

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Taos

   Taos is a small town with a big reputation among painters, writers and people who came for a visit and stayed. It lies at about 7,000 feet on a high plateau at the southern end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico, with the dark ridge of the range rising to the east and the dry sagebrush plain dropping to the Rio Grande gorge to the west. The light is extraordinary, clear and golden, and early in the twentieth century it drew a group of artists, the Taos Society of Artists, who painted the landscape and the people. D. H. Lawrence also lived near here for a time in the 1920s, and his ranch can be visited.

   Read the complete Taos write-up.

2. 2. Red River

   Red River is a mountain town that remembers being a mining camp, and it keeps a bit of the frontier in its main street. Prospectors arrived in the 1890s after gold and copper turned up in the canyon, and for a while the place was rough, with saloons and claims everywhere. The mines faded and the town reinvented itself as a ski and summer resort, and now it fills in winter with skiers and in summer with families, hikers and, on Memorial Day weekend, a large motorcycle rally that takes over the town.

   Read the complete Red River write-up.

3. 3. Eagle Nest

   Eagle Nest sits on the high Moreno Valley floor, where the wind has room to run, and the first thing you notice is the lake. Eagle Nest Lake was formed by a dam on the Cimarron River finished in 1918, a large, shining sheet of water against a backdrop of mountains. Anglers come for trout and kokanee salmon, and in winter ice-fishing shacks dot the surface. The village itself is little more than a strip of motels, cafés, and gift shops along the highway, with a population of a few hundred, and it lives on the traffic of the Enchanted Circle.

   Read the complete Eagle Nest write-up.

4. 4. Cimarron Canyon

5. 5. Angel Fire

   Angel Fire is best known for a single building, a small white chapel on a hillside that has nothing to do with skiing. Dr. Victor Westphall, a New Mexico man whose son David died in the Vietnam War in 1968, built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Chapel in his son's memory, and it grew into a state park that honours all those who served. The curved white walls rise against the mountains and the plain inside is deeply affecting. It is a place where people drop their voices without being asked.

   Read the complete Angel Fire write-up.

6. 6. Back to Taos

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Taos write-up.