Taos & the Northern Mountains
Taos Pueblo and the return of Blue Lake, Ohkay Owingeh where Oñate set his first capital, the Jicarilla homeland at Dulce, and O'Keeffe's Abiquiú.
Taos Pueblo's two adobe houses have stood on either side of Red Willow Creek for something like a thousand years, and the creek runs down from Blue Lake, high in the mountains behind them. The government took the lake into a national forest in 1906. The people of Taos spent sixty-four years asking for it back, and on December 15, 1970, President Nixon signed the law that returned it and some 48,000 acres around it.
Juan de Oñate set up the first Spanish capital in 1598 beside Ohkay Owingeh, where the Chama meets the Rio Grande. Eighty-two years later Po'pay, a religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh, worked out of Taos to plan the revolt that in August 1680 drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years. Taos rose again in January 1847, after the American conquest, and killed the new governor, Charles Bent of Bent's Fort; the Army shelled the pueblo's church with people sheltering inside it.
West of the Rio Grande gorge the land climbs into the Jicarilla Apache Nation, with its capital at Dulce, and the narrow-gauge Cumbres & Toltec still steams over the pass from Chama into Colorado. Down the Chama, Georgia O'Keeffe painted the red and yellow cliffs at Ghost Ranch and lived in Abiquiú, a village founded in the 1750s as a settlement for genízaros, Native people taken captive and raised in Spanish households.
What to See in Taos & the Northern Mountains
5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Scenic Drives through Taos & the Northern Mountains
Stories from Taos & the Northern Mountains
Taos & the Northern Mountains rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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