Every driver who climbs NM-38 east out of Red River today crosses Bobcat Pass, at 9,820 feet the highest mountain pass in New Mexico. It was not always the way over the mountain. Until the summer of 1966, traffic between Red River and the Moreno Valley crossed Red River Pass, a switchback road built in 1915 and 1916 that old-timers now call simply the Old Pass.
The first road over the mountain was not the pass at all, but a wagon track that climbed Red River Hill from Elizabethtown through Road Canyon. With grades as steep as 27 percent, it was treacherous when dry and impassable in winter. Travelers cut down a tree at the top and dragged the log behind their wagons so the load would not run over their own horses on the way down.
By 1914, Red River's remaining residents had decided their dying mining town had no future without a better road. They formed a Good Roads Association, and the U.S. Forest Service agreed to build the new pass. Work began in June 1915 under engineer Howard B. Waha and was finished the next summer under Kenneth C. Balcomb, who later told the story in his book The Red River Hill. Built to Forest Service standards, with grades no steeper than 7.5 percent, the road let automobiles reach Red River safely for the first time.
The new pass served Red River for half a century, carrying the town through the end of mining, the Great Depression, and World War II. But by the 1950s, drivers used to asphalt found its gravel switchbacks frightening, and the opening of the Red River Ski Area in 1959 brought winter traffic the old road was never built for. The New Mexico Department of Transportation decided on a new crossing, over Bobcat Pass.
Work on the Bobcat Pass road began in 1962, and it was finished by the summer of 1966. That summer, through traffic rolled over Bobcat Pass for the first time, and Red River Pass became the Old Pass, closed to through traffic and gated at the Colfax County line. The old switchbacks never disappeared. They survive today as a Forest Service road, a favorite off-roading and hiking route where the carvings on the aspen trees record generations of travelers, and the views from the top still show why people fought so hard for a road over this mountain.
Photo: the Bobcat Pass summit sign on NM-38, by Jeffrey Beall, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0). Sources: Questa News, drawing on Kenneth C. Balcomb's The Red River Hill.