Sunday, November 1, 2026
There is a particular quiet to a Sunday morning in Red River, especially the morning after Halloween, when the clocks have fallen back an hour and the town has gained an extra hour of sleep. It is a good moment to remember that this small mountain town has reinvented itself more than once, and that the welcoming community you find on Main Street today grew out of people who simply refused to leave when the boom ended.
Long before there was a town here, this high valley in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains was summer hunting ground for the Ute and Jicarilla Apache. In the late nineteenth century, miners from Elizabethtown in the Moreno Valley were drawn in by gold strikes, and the settlement that grew up was first called River City, later Red River, after the stream that flows through town from the northern slopes of Wheeler Peak. By 1895 Red River was a booming mining camp with an estimated population of 3,000, working gold, silver and copper in mines with names like Golden Treasure, Silver King and Black Copper, and supporting two newspapers, a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, hotels, a dance hall and a hospital.
The bust came quickly. As the mines played out, the population dwindled, falling to roughly 150 by 1905, and many storefronts stood empty. But the town lived on. Homesteaders came to outnumber prospectors, and residents found new momentum in an unexpected place: renting abandoned mining cabins to flatland visitors seeking refuge from the summer heat. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Red River was being spoken of as a mountain playground, and through the 1930s the remaining residents turned to tourism to sustain the town. The photograph with this article, taken in 1934, shows a weathered false-front wooden building from that in-between time, when the mining era was fading and the visitor era was just beginning.
That reinvention set the pattern visitors still enjoy. The old mining camp gained a reputation as a cool-weather getaway and a trout fishing paradise, and a second reinvention arrived with winter when the ski area opened in 1959, giving the town a snowy season to match its summers. Through every change, the thread has been community: families who stayed, rebuilt and welcomed the next generation of guests as neighbors, at least for a weekend.
If you are planning a visit, this is a fine season to do it. Red River Ski and Summer Area plans to open for the 2026-27 season on Wednesday, November 25, with winter tubing scheduled to begin a day earlier, on November 24. Today itself is a wet, stay-cozy kind of Sunday, with rain in town, a high near 52, and rain turning to snow overnight into Monday, and widespread light precipitation showing across northern New Mexico and the Enchanted Circle and along I-25 in southern Colorado. Drive carefully, enjoy the earlier evening light after the time change, and take a moment on Main Street to appreciate a town that has been welcoming people back for well over a century.