November 8 is a hinge date in Red River, deep in the quiet weeks between fall color and ski season, when the town watches the sky and waits for winter to commit. Two years ago today, winter committed all at once. A slow-moving storm that began on November 6, 2024, finished on November 8 with blizzard conditions across northeastern New Mexico, and the deepest snow in the state piled up right here on the Enchanted Circle, at Angel Fire. That storm is our lead item, anchoring an almanac that also reaches back to a county election, a cavalry ride into Cimarron, and a hard lesson in mountain flying.
Red River Town & Main Street
On November 8, 1904, Taos County voters, including the mining camp of Red River City, chose their county sheriff. Silviano Lucero won the office of alguacil mayor, the county sheriff, by a majority of 143 votes, with Bernardino Cisneros as his deputy, a result reported that winter in La Revista de Taos. In a camp where Main Street was still a row of miners' stores and saloons, county law came from Taos, a hard ride away. Election day was civic life at its most practical: the town paused, voted, and went back to preparing for winter.
Mining & the Gold Rush
November brought no single dated strike in the Circle's mining country, so consider the season itself. By early November, water was the whole question in the gold camps. Hydraulic mining on Baldy Mountain depended on the Big Ditch, the 41-mile system of ditches and flumes that carried Red River headwaters to the Elizabethtown diggings, and that work wound down as ditches froze and creeks ran icy. Miners in Red River, Elizabethtown, and La Belle spent these weeks on timbering, tunnel work, and repairs underground, banking what the short season had produced and settling in to winter.
Founding Families, Characters & Legends
On Monday, November 8, 1875, a cavalry detachment from Fort Union rode into Cimarron to keep civil order, sent at the request of Territorial Governor Samuel Axtell as the Colfax County War tightened its grip on the Maxwell Land Grant country. One week earlier, Clay Allison had shot Francisco "Pancho" Griego in Henri Lambert's Cimarron saloon after Griego came looking to avenge his nephew. Melvin Mills, a Santa Fe Ring supporter accused in the Tolby murder case, returned to town about the time the soldiers arrived and was released for lack of evidence. Two days later the crisis claimed another life, and Cimarron's violent autumn entered Circle legend.
Skiing & Winter
The storm at the top of today's almanac was also a skier's storm. The November 6 to 8, 2024 snowfall buried the Moreno Valley just weeks before the Circle's ski areas opened, the kind of early November gift that has shaped local winters since Red River Ski Area opened in December 1959. Red River has built its tradition on this pattern, opening the day before Thanksgiving for more than forty consecutive years, this year on Wednesday, November 25. When forty inches fall at Angel Fire in one early storm, every ski town on the Circle starts measuring the season to come.
Enchanted Circle Towns & Places
One day before today's date, on November 7, 1906, the Forest Service established the Taos Forest Reserve with 233,200 acres around Taos and the southern Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It became a national forest on March 4, 1907, and on July 1, 1908, it was combined with part of the Jemez National Forest to create the Carson National Forest, the forest surrounding Red River, Questa, and Eagle Nest today. Nearly every trailhead, ski run, and campground view on the Enchanted Circle sits inside that decision, made 120 years ago this week.
The Land, Weather & Wildlife
Our lead item belongs here. From November 6 to November 8, 2024, a slow-moving winter storm slammed northern New Mexico, and the National Weather Service in Albuquerque later counted it among the year's most memorable events. Angel Fire, three miles east of town, recorded forty inches of snow in three days, the highest total in the state. Rociada recorded thirty-six inches and Sapello twenty-five, while nearly the whole region north and east of Albuquerque picked up one to two feet. Blizzard warnings covered northeastern New Mexico on November 8, a reminder that on the Circle, early November can deliver midwinter in full.
Roads, Stage Lines & Travel
On November 8, 2002, travel to Taos by air ended in tragedy and in a lasting lesson about these mountains. A Westwind business jet flying from Las Vegas to pick up a passenger at Taos Municipal Airport was destroyed on approach that afternoon, and both pilots were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause was the pilot's inadvertent flight into mountain wave weather conditions while flying in cloud, resulting in a loss of aircraft control. Mountain waves are a known hazard over the Sangre de Cristo range, and the report remains part of how pilots learn to respect Circle weather.
Living History & Heritage
On November 8, 2019, the Historic Santa Fe Foundation opened the exhibition The Taos Moderns in Santa Fe at El Zaguan, with an opening reception that evening, presenting the artists who made Taos a center of American modernism after the Second World War. The show, mounted with 203 Fine Art of Taos, ran into January 2020. It is a fitting closing note: the Circle's heritage is not only mines and ski lifts, but also a living art tradition, still exhibited and carried forward by the communities around Wheeler Peak.
So November 8 holds a county election, soldiers in Cimarron, a forest reserve born one day earlier, a fatal approach to Taos, modern art on view, and forty inches of snow at Angel Fire. In Red River today the pattern is quieter, with opening day ahead on November 25, but the lesson stands. Around Wheeler Peak, November is when the past and the coming winter arrive together.