Sierra Blanca: White Mountain, the Sacred Peak

Look to the west and you will see it above everything else, a broad pale summit that dominates this whole corner of New Mexico. This is Sierra Blanca, White Mountain, and at eleven thousand nine hundred eighty-one feet it is the highest peak in all of southern New Mexico. It is also the most southerly point in the entire continental United States to rise above eleven thousand feet, a lonely giant of alpine tundra standing far south of the Rockies, ringed by desert on nearly every side.

Lifting more than five thousand five hundred feet above the land around it, it ranks among the most prominent mountains in the state, and on a clear day you can pick it out from a very long way off. But elevation is the least important thing about this mountain. To the Mescalero Apache, whose reservation includes the summit, Sierra Blanca is a sacred peak, one of the holy mountains that mark the edges of their traditional world.

In their teachings this place is tied to their creation stories. Sierra Blanca is described as the link between Mescalero creation, the past, and the future, the very heart of their homeland. It is not a backdrop.

It is a living relative. Because the peak is sacred, and because the summit lies inside the reservation, reaching the very top requires permission from the tribe. This is not a mountain to be conquered casually.

For generations the Mescalero have gathered near its slopes for ceremonies that continue to this day. And from these heights the snowmelt gathers into a small, fast stream that crashes so loudly over the rocks that Spanish speakers called it the noisy river, the Rio Ruidoso. The town below took the same name.

So everything down here, the village, the racetrack, the ski runs, the resort, all of it begins up there, on the white shoulders of this peak. Keep it in view as you drive, and remember whose mountain it is.