Summer Travel: Small Town // Big City

{ No.7-Small Town: Taos } Noah Caldwell

If you stand on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge and look down, 565 feet of suspended air stares back at you, making your white knuckles brace the railing as cars behind you rumble the bridge’s foundation. It’s this drop—making it the seventh-highest bridge in America— that gathers wailing buskers, gawking sunburnt Texans and, on the day I went, tour buses with “Women Traveling Together” plastered on the side. But the surrounding panorama of landscape—its ski resorts, its self-sufficient houses, its thriving Native American community, its rows of niche art galleries—is what makes northern New Mexico a “destination.”I

Taos should be the envy of all mountain towns. It’s not easy to attract ogling deep-pocketed tourists and die-hard adrenaline junkies without becoming ritzy, overdone and corporate. But Taos does it with ease.

The non-precocious, approachable yet exhaustive art scene of Taos is a case in point. Take Greg Moon’s gallery, for example. With a prominent stop on art-heavy Kit Carson Road, Moon has developed an eclectic curatorial style, displaying simple yet elegant still-lifes alongside collage-like riffs of antique family photos adhered to old pieces of wood. Moon’s approach is an analogue for how Taos’ art world has shifted over the last century: no longer solely a bastion of southwestern cultural impressions—as it became after the founding of the Taos Society of Artists one hundred years ago—Taos has welcomed progressive, non-traditional creativity into its artistic bosom. Nearby are photography galleries, a new artist cooperative and countless modern art exhibitions, reinforcing the notion that Taos has become a hub for every medium. (If you still want a good dose of traditional southwestern art, the Millicent Rogers Museum is up the street.)

From our vantage point on the bridge, our gaze shifts north ever so slightly and—if it weren’t obstructed by a tract of highway and a few miles of plains—falls on the Taos Pueblo. The Taos Pueblo breaks the preconceived notions about Native Americans held by most outside observers. The residents have never been displaced or moved to an unfamiliar reservation. Quite the opposite, in fact: the community’s domain extends well beyond the photogenic adobe mud and plaster edifices, and includes over 48,000 acres of Taos Mountain (on the other side of which sits Taos Valley Ski Resort).

The longest continuously inhabited village in North America, it has stood for a millennium. But practical administrative realities are catching up with long-standing cultural mores. Young women are more likely now to finish high school and go to college, since men of the same age often prioritize coming of age responsibilities over education. This means there are growing outlets for women to take on leadership roles, shaking up a traditional male-dominated structure of self-governance. (Communities like the Taos Pueblo are sovereign nations, unbound by the laws of the United States.)

Ilona Spruce and Noreen Mirabal explained the ripples of change as we toured the Pueblo, a mosaic of multi-level sturdy mud abodes, their removable cedar ladders leading to the upper stories. Since being designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Pueblo has seen a marked influx of tourists, and has also had to adhere to various stipulations to keep the title. As a result, a tourism office was created, with a tourism director and staff. Who filled these roles? Ilona Spruce and Noreen Mirabal. They now regularly advise and present to the Tribal Council—a governing body made up of male elders and past War Chiefs, which traditionally was closed to women.

Taos is as rich in ecological delights as culture and heritage. Perched up at 7,000 feet above sea level, one might picture a dry, barren, windswept clime. But make your way into the Rio Grande Gorge (now we’re looking down from the bridge to the water below) and you enter a playground of geological curiosity and high-altitude flora and fauna. Stuart Wilde of Wild Earth Llama Adventures led us down the gorge’s steep eastern face, traversing cutbacks and stopping to wax scientific about various sights and sounds. Some tidbits? The gorge was formed by the erosion of successive magma layers that had been compacted into roughly equivalent bands of off-red ledges (unlike the Grand Canyon’s geologic makeup, which is a mélange of sandstone, limestone and other non-volcanic sediment). The micro-climate of the gorge is an inversion of the surrounding landscape: spruce and Douglas firs are found the more you descend, trees which typically increase with elevation, not depth. Moisture is trapped near the bottom, cooling the riverside much as the peaks of mountains do. Finally, in case you were curious, llamas (or “yamas” if you want to be polite) are actually native to North America, moving to South America and across the prehistoric land bridge to Asia before becoming eradicated in what is now the United States. Now you know.

Sadly, a defining aspect of any trip to Taos is the feeling that there’s simply too much to discover before you leave. (Much like a travel writer lamenting the waning word count allotted to describe such a place.) Partly that’s because the sheer volume of Taos activities outstrips one’s capacity: rafting on the Rio Grande (I’d recommend Los Rios River Runners); slurping down happy hour at Taos Mesa Brewing’s airplane hangar of a brewpub; witnessing local musical legend Jimmy Stadler pound on his piano. You’re going to need more than a long weekend.

But something more fundamental than time constraints hits the visitor to Taos: you want to be a local. This is a tall order anywhere, and it certainly won’t happen easily in the snug patchwork of the Taos community. But I implore you to try, regardless—you’ll find welcoming arms at every turn, and if you stick around long enough you may be able to fake it, for a time.