New Mexico History

Sunday, October 25, 2026

Sunday is starting cloudy and cool in Red River, near 37 degrees this morning after a 7:18 AM sunrise, with showers expected through the day, a high near 49, and sunset at 6:12 PM. Tonight rain is expected to change to snow showers as temperatures fall, and Monday should turn sunny with a high near 51. It is a good day for a slow Main Street stroll between showers, a warm drink, and a little town history, which in Red River is never more than a block or two away.

Drive to the west end of Red River, where Main Street gives out toward the canyon, and you reach 110 acres of river meadow that have been hosting travelers for nearly ninety years. Today the property is 4K River Ranch, at 1501 West Main Street. In 1936 it became Lewis Ranch — and the little slab-sided cabins its founder built there are still taking guests.

If you have ever driven Interstate 25 down from Colorado toward Raton, Cimarron Canyon, and Red River, you have crossed Raton Pass — and in the 1800s, that gateway had a gatekeeper. He was Richens Lacy Wootton, a Virginia-born mountain man known as Uncle Dick, and he built a toll road over the roughest stretch of the Santa Fe Trail and charged every wagon that rolled through. Born on May 6, 1816, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, Wootton lived one of the great character stories of the southern Rockies.

Long before prospectors named a mining camp Red River City, another community was already putting down roots on the same river, down the canyon where the water leaves the high country. Did you know that the Red River itself gave that first settlement its name? Rio Colorado is Spanish for Red River, and the families who built San Antonio del Rio Colorado, the village we know today as Questa, were farming and herding sheep along its banks a full generation before the gold rush remade the valley upstream.

Yes — it is the same mountain. The Baldy Mountain that looms over the old Maxwell Land Grant stories is the very peak that Scouts today know as Mt Baldy, the highest point of Philmont Scout Ranch. At 12,441 feet, Baldy is the tallest summit in the Cimarron Range, rising some 3,640 feet straight out of the Moreno Valley about six miles northeast of Eagle Nest — close enough to Red River that its bare, treeless crown is part of the skyline this whole valley lives under.

Drive the Enchanted Circle south from Eagle Nest, through the wide Moreno Valley, and you come to the youngest town on the loop. Angel Fire did not grow up around a mine or a railroad. It began as a cattle ranch, and the ski resort at its heart was dreamed up at the family dinner table. The LeBus family came from Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1954, after buying the roughly 10,000-acre Monte Verde Ranch. Two years later Roy LeBus and his brother G.F.

On any summer morning in Red River, you will find anglers easing into the cold, clear river that runs right through town, casting for rainbow trout in the shade of the pines. Did you know that a good share of those fish began their lives just down the canyon, in a working hatchery that has been raising trout on this river since 1941? The Red River Fish Hatchery is living history in the truest sense: not a monument behind glass, but a heritage that still goes to work every single day.

Drive east out of Red River over Bobcat Pass and the Moreno Valley suddenly opens wide in front of you, and there, spread across the valley floor, is a sheet of blue water ringed by pasture and peaks. Did you know that Eagle Nest Lake is not a natural lake at all? A little more than a century ago there was no lake there, only the Cimarron River winding through ranch country, until two ranching brothers decided to dam it and change the eastern side of the Enchanted Circle forever.