Hopewell, New Mexico: Gold in the Tusas Mountains

Half a mile south of US Route Sixty-Four in the Tusas Mountains of Rio Arriba County, the ghost town of Hopewell sits above a lake in a high meadow clearing. The name came from rancher and promoter Willard S. Hopewell, who helped develop the district after gold was discovered here.

At its brief peak the community had a post office, which operated from eighteen ninety-four to nineteen oh six. The mines carried hopeful names, and prospectors believed they had found great wealth. They had not, the gold was real but the deposits were thin, and when the ore played out the miners left and the mountain took the buildings back.

The old townsite sits at about eight thousand sixty-eight feet, and the census has listed zero residents in every count from nineteen sixty through twenty ten. A snowpack measuring station now occupies the site, recording winter precipitation in the watershed that feeds the Rio Grande downstream. The station was established in nineteen ninety-three, and precipitation here averages nearly twenty-eight inches a year.

The record low is nineteen degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Old prospect pits remain scattered through the surrounding forest, the only visible evidence of the rush that briefly made this meadow worth naming.