Red River — the Miners' Town That Became a Ski Town

This is Red River — eighty-seven hundred feet, a single main street, and a ski mountain rising directly behind the shops. It is one of the most compact and likeable mountain towns in the Southwest.

The mining came first. In the eighteen nineties there was a gold and copper rush up these canyons and Red River went from nothing to a boomtown of several thousand almost overnight — saloons, hotels, the full performance. Many of the people who built it came over the hill from Elizabethtown, which had already boomed and was already dying. Miners follow the metal.

And then the metal ran out, as it does, and Red River nearly went the way of every other camp in these mountains.

What saved it was a genuinely clever reinvention. In the middle of the twentieth century the town leaned into being a summer escape for people from the flat, hot parts of Texas and Oklahoma — and then, when lifts went up on the mountain, into skiing. The ski area's base is right in town, which is unusual and very convenient; you can walk from a coffee shop to a chairlift.

The Texas connection is real and long-standing, and locals will joke about it affectionately.

Whatever the season, this is a good place to stop. Get out, walk the street, eat something. You are about to climb over a pass, and there is not much on the other side for a while.