Northern New Mexico's Bohemian Soul by Barb Sligl
Featured Hotel in Santa Fe
Inn of the Anasazi
See all hotels in Santa Fe >
It’s the light. A striking play of light and shadow and texture. Georgia O’Keeffe captured it in her iconic paintings - red adobe walls, ochre rock faces, bleached bones against a brilliant blue sky - as Ansel Adams did in his stark black-and-white photography - low, ominous clouds over scrub-dotted craggy hills. In northern New Mexico, it’s all earth and sky - bright, bold, big.
O’Keeffe once described this land as “…perfectly mad looking country - hills and cliffs and washes too crazy to imagine all thrown up in the air by God and let tumble where they would…” She was enchanted by it. (Seems the state slogan “Land of Enchantment” is particularly apt.) A photo taken by her husband, photographer Arthur Stieglitz, titled Georgia O’Keeffe - After Return from New Mexico, shows her with a small, secretive smile, as if sharing a bit of her recent enchantment.
It’s hard not to be sucked in by the beauty here. North of Albuquerque, in the high desert of Santa Fe and beyond to Taos, along the rugged Rio Grande gorge, you’re in lunar-like landscape. Ghost Ranch seems like its centre, a microcosm of the northern New Mexico character: from its sordid beginnings as an isolated working ranch owned by two brothers tried for murder and hanged (on a massive cottonwood still there) to a dude ranch for escaping and convalescing elite like the Lindberghs (the thin, dry air was sought as TB treatment) and O’Keeffe’s stomping grounds (what she nicknamed “my backyard”), and now a retreat for spiritual and creative exploration.
An Inspirational Landscape
Legendary writer D.H. Lawrence also found something he was searching for in northern New Mexico while on his “savage pilgrimage.” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever…In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new… (From his 1928 essay “New Mexico.”)
He visited the socialite and salon-like hostess of visiting artistes Mabel Dodge Luhan in the 1920s in Taos (O’Keeffe also discovered New Mexico through her; and, in the 1970s, Mabel’s house was bought by actor Dennis Hopper, who played host in a new era of counterculture to guests like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen). So besotted was Lawrence with this land that he traded his original manuscript of Sons and Lovers for Mabel’s Kiowa Ranch. There he wrote under a lofty pine that O’Keeffe immortalized in The Lawrence Tree.
And artists continue to be drawn here. Santa Fe is a mecca for traditional and contemporary art (it’s a UNESCO-certified “Creative City”). Visit gallery after gallery on Canyon Road (with everything from 17th-century beaded moccasins to contemporary kinetic sculpture) and walk by rustic turquoise painted doors (vibrant blue is everywhere, thought to ward off evil spirits at entryways and windows) and the chalky red adobe of local homes. It’s a tourist drag for a reason.
Off the beaten path is a bit of a different art vibe. The Santa Fe Railyard Park and Plaza is home to SITE Sante Fe, a kunsthalle (a German term for a non-collecting exhibition space) that’s known internationally for its Biennial contemporary art presentation. The last biennial included pieces like Story Line, a snake-like clay sculpture of familiar red-brown adobe that oozed from the SITE exterior to end in a splat inside the main gallery (largely described as a big bowel movement)—a reinterpretation of traditional materials by a local Santa Clara Pueblo family of artists.
Pueblos and Pilgrimages
Of course, generations of pueblo peoples (there are 19 pueblos in New Mexico) have created more traditional art through that same adobe—literally earth or mud—and still do. At San Ildefonso Pueblo another family produces Pre-Columbian and contemporary styles of pottery. The clay, plants for paint, and cedar wood and dung for firing are all collected from the surrounding high desert. The land still sways.
And literally. People make pilgrimages to gather handfuls of holy dirt at El Santuario de Chimayó, believed to be a place of healing and likely the most-visited church in New Mexico. The Spanish-Pueblo chapel is quintessential adobe style, with wooden vigas and rustic paintings inside. The small hole of plain-looking sandy earth draws visitor after visitor, scooping the precious stuff into paper bags to take home.
From the pilgrim seeking northern New Mexico’s dry dust to the cliché of the fiesta-skirted, silver-bangled, big-belt-buckled, boot-clad and Stetson-topped local striding across the plaza in Santa Fe, this place is made up of strong and independent spirits that stretch back to the days when Billy the Kid rode into Santa Fe with guns blazing (more than once). (And the iconic outlaw tangled with another defiant character in northern New Mexico’s history, General Lew Wallace, one-time governor of the territory, and best-selling author of Ben-Hur…)
Today’s cowboys in northern New Mexico are more sedate—think hand-sewn chaps and Wranglers, tough boots and spurs, and a wide pearly white smile (no chewing tobacco to mess with modern-day teeth, just the standard blade of grass hanging out of the mouth). In the far-north mountain town of Red River you’ll find such cowboys guiding trail rides into the aspen forest, climbing old trails to open meadows under that big, big sky. Red River’s past as an old frontier town from the glory days of gold, silver and copper mining is part of its small-town charm today as a low-key skiing, hiking, horseback riding and hunting destination. And its cowboys, of course.
Wild West Roots
Northern New Mexico is steeped in the mythology of the West. An exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art, How the West Is One: The Art of New Mexico (through 2010’s celebrations of Santa Fe’s 400th anniversary), takes you on an intercultural—Native American, Hispanic, and European-American—journey through 125 years of art and history. Part of the Wild West roots is transportation—horses, wagons, route 66, even the motorbike (the exhibit includes a Harley alongside a photograph of O’Keeffe hitching a ride to Abiquiú on the back of one)…and the railroad.
The Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad is a living artifact of the American West. Little has changed since its beginnings in 1880; it’s a ride back to the steam era of mountain railroading. (Think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was partly filmed here). The narrow-gauge rail line travels through whispering forests of aspen (with rail-side tree trunks that still feature the etchings of long-gone miners and crew), high mountain passes and craggy canyons to the vast San Luis Valley, all along the Colorado-New Mexico border. The scenery is predictably stunning (and even more so when the aspens turn a burnished yellow in the fall).
Another photo in the How the West is One exhibit shows the first detonation of the nuclear bomb in 1945 near Los Alamos, a town perhaps better known as the home of the Manhattan Project. Secret goings-on, strange personalities…some of which feels like it’s still going on; photos prohibited in certain directions, side roads barricaded and off-limits, security checkpoints. But the town is chock-full of intellectual types drawn here from all over the world to work at the Los Alamos National Lab and contribute to this stealthy scientific community (with an almost fanatical enthusiasm for the place).
And that’s the spirit of northern New Mexico—an eclectic mix of aspirational and inspirational characters. Artists, pueblo and Hispano peoples, cowboys, revolutionaries—as much a part of this landscape as the hills and valleys and sky and clouds themselves. O’Keeffe called the land of northern New Mexico “the faraway.” A surreal and enchanting land of beauty and space—and that light.