The village of Arroyo Hondo is off to the left here, down in its valley — an old Hispano settlement that in the late nineteen sixties became something nobody planned for.
In nineteen sixty-seven, a commune called New Buffalo was founded here. And it became, for a few years, one of the most famous counterculture communities in America. Taos in that era drew thousands of people who were leaving the cities to build something else — communes with names like Morningstar and the Hog Farm, adobe houses built by people who had never built anything, geodesic domes going up in the sagebrush.
Dennis Hopper filmed part of Easy Rider around here in nineteen sixty-eight, and the commune scenes in that movie were shot in this county. He then bought a house in Taos and stayed for years.
Now, the part that usually gets left out of the nostalgia. The arrival of several thousand young outsiders, with money from elsewhere and no idea of local land, water or custom, in villages whose families had been farming those acequias for three hundred years, did not go smoothly. There was real friction, and sometimes worse. Locals will tell you about it if you ask.
Most of the communes were gone within a decade. But the era changed Taos permanently — it is a large part of why this small mountain town has the galleries, the food, the alternative-building scene and the politics it has today.
And it left one genuinely strange legacy up here, which Boone will get to.
Photo: Jay Cross from Berkeley, California, US · CC BY 2.0