Coming up on your right is the junction with Highway One Fifty, signed for Arroyo Seco and Taos Ski Valley. We are NOT taking it — stay straight on Five Twenty-Two — but it is worth knowing what is up there.
That road runs about eighteen miles up a canyon to Taos Ski Valley, which sits at ninety-two hundred feet at the foot of Wheeler Peak, and which for decades had a reputation as one of the most difficult ski mountains in North America. The old joke was that the sign at the base said 'Don't panic — you're looking at only one third of Taos Ski Valley, and we have easy runs too.' That sign existed. It was necessary.
Before it was a ski area it was Twining, a mining camp — copper and gold, the same story as everywhere else up here — that failed spectacularly around nineteen hundred after a smelter was built and turned out not to work.
On the way up you pass through Arroyo Seco, a small village that is worth the drive on its own: adobe, a handful of very good shops, and an ice cream place that people plan trips around.
The man who built the ski valley out of that dead mining camp had one of the more remarkable lives of the twentieth century, and Boone is going to tell you about him.
For now: stay on Five Twenty-Two, heading north. The mountains stay on your right.
Photo: Fredlyfish4 · CC BY-SA 3.0