November 1 arrives in Red River with the clocks turned back, rain in the valley, and snow in the forecast — the hinge day between fall color and ski season. On November 1, 2010, the Red River Ski Area officially started making snow, building the white piles visitors could see on the webcams as the town prepared to open on November 24. Here is November 1, and the season around it, across the Enchanted Circle.
Red River Town & Main Street
Early November has long been Red River's quiet hinge week, and Main Street institutions plan for it. The Red River Community House, the log hall built by town residents and photographed full of neighbors in 1955, was in time winterized for exactly this season — a new high-efficiency heating system, new windows, and plumbing improvements — so its free family activities could run all year instead of only in summer. Winter guests could then expect guided snowshoe tours, dancing, and teen programs. Seasonal context, not an anniversary — a promise that town stays alive after the first cold snap.
Mining & the Gold Rush
For a mining story tied to this season, look east of Red River to Questa, where the soft black mineral found along Sulphur Gulch was long mistaken for graphite. In 1916 its true nature was recognized as molybdenite, the ore of molybdenum, a metal used to harden steel. The R and S Molybdenum Company was formed in 1918 and production began in 1919, and the Questa mine that grew from those claims worked on and off for nearly a century. At its peak it accounted for about ten percent of world molybdenum production — a very different Circle mining chapter from the gold camps.
Founding Families, Characters & Legends
Elizabethtown, the Moreno Valley boomtown west of Eagle Nest, was named for a child. When Captain William H. Moore and his fellow businessmen platted the townsite in 1868, they named it for Moore's daughter, Elizabeth Catherine Moore, who had just turned four years old. Elizabeth grew up with the camp she was named for, became its first schoolteacher, and lived her entire life in Elizabethtown, remaining there until her death in 1937 — long after the gold had faded and most of the seven thousand residents had moved on. Her grave is in the cemetery there, a founding-family story you can still stand beside on the Circle today.
Skiing & Winter
Our lead item belongs here. On November 1, 2010, the Red River Ski Area officially started making snow in preparation for a November 24 opening, continuing a run of more than forty consecutive years opening the day before Thanksgiving. Snowmaking was no novelty in Red River by then: the ski area was among the first in the Rocky Mountains to make snow, back in the early 1960s. Before that, staff put straw across bare spots or drove up Pioneer Canyon to shovel snow into the first snowcat and haul it back down to the slopes. November 1, 2010 was simply the modern version of that same determination.
Enchanted Circle Towns & Places
Here is today's other exact-date anniversary. On November 1, 1861, the Territory of Colorado created its seventeen original counties, and the village then called San Miguel — today Costilla, in Taos County just north of Questa — was named the original seat of Costilla County. There was one problem: nobody had surveyed the line carefully. In 1869 a United States survey determined that the village was actually in Taos County, New Mexico Territory, and on October 21, 1872 its post office was officially renamed Costilla, New Mexico.
The Land, Weather & Wildlife
November weather has always set the terms in this country, and the National Register nomination for Eagle Nest Dam tells that story plainly. Major construction on the dam began in early 1918, a temporary town housed several hundred workers near the site, and the underground work was finished in 1919. Then the severe winter freezes of 1919 and 1920 made it impossible to lay cement during a large part of the year, slowing the whole project. Only in late 1920 were the final phases completed, giving northeastern New Mexico ranchers a reliable irrigation supply. When rain turns to snow over the Circle this week, that is the old bargain at work.
Roads, Stage Lines & Travel
In November 1878 — this month, though not this exact day — the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad advanced its track from Trinidad, Colorado, into New Mexico. For Elizabethtown, by then a virtual ghost town of about one hundred residents, it was a second chance: ore could finally be shipped much more cheaply, investment in the area mines increased again, and the town's population rose with it. E-Town was, in the words of its chroniclers, reborn. Around the Circle, a better road or rail line has always been able to change a town's fortune in a single season.
Living History & Heritage
November 1 is also, every year, All Saints Day, opening the November 1 and 2 observance of Día de los Muertos across northern New Mexico. Families honor their dead with ofrendas — home altars carrying photographs, favorite foods, marigolds, and candles — and with visits to cemeteries to clean graves, leave flowers, and remember. New Mexico Magazine's guide to this year's celebrations notes that observances peak on November 1 and 2. In Taos County's Hispanic villages, many of them older than Red River itself, this is living history in the truest sense: heritage carried on by families, in public, on this date every year.
So November 1 in the Enchanted Circle holds a county seat that crossed a border, a railroad that revived a gold town, and snow guns firing above Main Street. With rain turning to snow tonight and Red River Ski and Summer Area set to open on Wednesday, November 25, the old pattern holds: winter is coming, and this town, as always, is getting ready for it.