New Mexico's open northeast

 

Raptor nest, Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge

In the snow, an inattentive mountain chickadee left the pavement too slowly and bounced off my car hood. The bird might have survived and only been stunned but I will never know. Crossing Raton Pass occupied my thoughts.

All I week I feared Raton Pass. I had driven across in summer, crawling north in construction on the last miles of New Mexico, rewarded with stunning views of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains when crossing the top. On most days, the 7,800-foot low point on the Colorado-New Mexico border presented few problems. In winter, predictions went out the window. Approaching Trinidad, the last city before the climb to the New Mexico, I could see the storm clouds settling around Fishers Peak, the squared-topped mountain just on the Colorado side. 

The flakes started as the road rose, the slush turned into a few inches of wet snow. At the top, I didn’t bother looking for signs welcoming us to the Land of Enchantment. Nor did I want to stop in Raton, first town over the border. At 1,000 feet and several miles below the pass, the snow still drove hard. Soon enough, the road dropped in altitude and the snow just wetted the pavement. 

From the interstate route, the first views of New Mexico are broad and flat, the same high plains that cover the Texas Panhandle and New Mexico’s northeast corner. While tempting to label the long acres of grasslands and farms as barren, the land is rich with features and history. There are always mountains to the west, hiding Taos from view. A series of roads branched that way and disappeared. 

Geographic landmarks such as Wagon Mound, a butte rising over a small town of the same name. The highway cuts between several other buttes, a firm reminder of New Mexico’s stark difference from points east. The two branches of the Santa Fe Trail converged in this land, the mountain route that crossed Raton Pass and the Cimarron Cutoff that cut across the dry plains. The two routes rejoin in Watrous north of Las Vegas for the rest of the trip to Santa Fe. 

First, we had to stop for gas and food in Las Vegas, northern New Mexico’s largest town. Stopping for a quick takeout meal from a local New Mexican cuisine spot, El Encanto, the change in accents resounded immediately. The Spanish spoken here resonated with different inflections, as northern Mexico is culturally different from southern New Mexico.

With indoor dining barred due to the pandemic, we grabbed a park bench in Las Vegas Plaza, Old Town’s Spanish Colonial-style center. The plaza’s setting compensated for the blustery, overcast afternoon. Surrounded by two- and three--story buildings, the most notable is the Plaza Hotel, built in the 1870s and site of the first reunion of Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, and Roosevelt later announced his campaign for president from the hotel. The hotel occupies an entire block around the plaza, having annexed the former Ilfeld’s Department Store, once the Southwest’s largest.

Calumet sign

Las Vegas has been a frequent movie location, including No Country for Old Man, where a highway overpass stood in for the U.S.-Mexico border at Laredo, and Kevin Costner’s Wyatt Earp. Las Vegas also played the fictional Calumet, Colorado, in the 1980s war film Red Dawn. A mural welcoming people to Calumet still adorns a building wall, and several unique buildings used for filming locations stood out. 

With hopes of beating sunset to Albuquerque, we had no time to explore New Town, the cluster of buildings one mile from Old Town. New Town formed around the railroad and includes its own set of business and hotels, a reminder that 21st century Las Vegas was at one point two towns split by the Gallinas River. 

Before the last stretch to Albuquerque, we swung through the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge just east of town. In wetter years, the refuge can shelter thousands of migrating birds. Lack of rain dried out some ponds completely and reduced others to tiny slivers of blue. Most of the ponds where waterfowl flock in good years were dry. A kestrel, a few red-tailed hawks and other raptors patrolled the rolling fields. 

Compared to Raton, Glorieta Pass barely felt like a pass at all, just a slow steady increase from the plains that petered out around Las Vegas. Once again, Santa Fe grew close with Albuquerque just beyond, the signature bulk of Sandia Peak rising to the east and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains falling back to the north. There was only the matter of the sun in my eyes as the day ran out, nearly blinding as Albuquerque sprawled out beneath Sandia Peak. 

Sandia Peak on Albuquerque's east edge

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Church ruins, Pecos National Historical Park

From Albuquerque, the road starts its incline to the high ground. Portions of Santa Fe closest to the highway don’t give away its nature as the country’s oldest state capital. Having spent a full day on its confounding streets back in 2012, there was no time to dive into Santa Fe. 

Instead, there was a quieter place on Glorieta Pass. Leaving the highway, a few small towns populated by rusted pickup trucks rolled by. But we sought the older towns protected by Pecos National Historic Park, a collection of historic sites along Glorieta Pass that have been occupied for thousands of years as the pass covers a low point at the end of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The park is a marvel indicative of the crossroads of history it protects. 

Pueblo remnants

The main grounds include a remains of Pecos Pueblo, which had more than 2,000 residents at its peak, remnants of earlier settlements that date back nearly 1,000 years, and a pair of adobe churches constructed on the site, ruins of the youngest more than 300 years old, plus all the scenic vistas and juniper forests you can handle. Additional units include the site of the Battle of Glorieta Pass, some of which has been lost to the interstate’s construction, and wagon-rutted portions of the old Santa Fe Trail. 

It’s easy to imagine the relief of merchants and immigrants reaching this point on the trail – while the terminus would have still been days away, these last miles through the mountains were beautiful, with pine-covered ridges and steeper climes further west. 

Ridges around Glorieta Pass

 There was one last stop before Maxwell National Wildlife Refuge, outside the tiny town of Maxwell, all of it once part of the Maxwell Land Grant, one of North America’s largest private land holdings. The mountains crept back in, with the Colorado border hiding somewhere among them. At first I didn’t hold much hope for bird sightings, as drought impacted Maxwell the same as Las Vegas. The ponds had been reduced to mud flats or just cracked dirt basins. We followed one bumpy levee road to a dead-end, where people shot rifles. There were no giant flocks of migrating birds, but raptors everywhere, especially hawks. 

Then we saw them – three bald eagles swooping and soaring above one of the few ponds with any water. Three more, spaced apart, sat atop farm irrigation equipment in the distance. A handful of mule deer watched us intently, as refuges have hunting seasons. 

The snowy conditions on Raton Pass were a memory. The pavement was dry, although the Sangre de Cristo Mountains sported white caps. The mountains make the northern crossing on Raton Pass more spectacular, as they loom large on the western horizon before the quick descent toward Trinidad. A cold, cloudless day turned twilight and the rising of the full moon into a light show brightening the empty miles of interstate south of Pueblo. 

Red-tailed hawk, Maxwell NWR