Red River: The Last Gold Camp Still Standing
Near Red River, New Mexico
Red River sits at eight thousand six hundred eighty-eight feet above sea level in a narrow mountain valley in the Sangre de Cristo range of northern New Mexico, where the stream it is named for rushes down from the slopes above town. The name refers to the reddish iron oxide that tints the water running off the surrounding mountains. At this elevation, winters are long and hard, and summers are cool, which is exactly why the town exists at all.
Red River is the last surviving settlement of four gold camps that once operated in this corner of Taos County. Three of them are gone. Red River remains, not because its mines outlasted the others, but because it made a series of smart pivots when the ore ran out.
The town traces its founding to eighteen ninety-five, when prospectors drawn by gold and silver strikes established a booming camp here. At the peak, around eighteen ninety-seven, the population reached an estimated three thousand people. The mountains around Red River were threaded with mine shafts in the canyons of Bitter Creek, Goose Creek, Pioneer, Mallette, and upper Red River, extracting gold, silver, and copper from the Sangre de Cristo rock.
By nineteen oh five, the population had crashed to around one hundred fifty. The richest surface ore was gone, and miners had packed up for new strikes in Alaska and Colorado. What was left behind were abandoned cabins, empty saloons, and a handful of families who decided to stay.
Those families made a discovery. The empty cabins could be rented to people from the flatlands of Texas and Oklahoma who wanted to escape the summer heat. The trout stream running through town was a destination in itself. The cool mountain air was a product. Red River became a summer resort before anyone called it that, almost by accident, simply because the landscape was beautiful and the buildings were already standing.
Today Red River draws visitors year round, with a ski area that opened in nineteen fifty-nine and a historic main street that still shows the bones of its mining past. It is the only one of those four gold camps still incorporated as a town.
