Wheeler Peak and the Roof of New Mexico

Wheeler Peak is the highest point in New Mexico, at thirteen thousand one hundred and sixty-seven feet. The approach from Taos takes you through Carson National Forest, named for the scout and Army officer Kit Carson, who spent much of his career in and around Taos and whose relationship with the Indigenous peoples of the region was complicated by any honest accounting. The irony of the forest name is not subtle to anyone who knows the history.

Carson National Forest covers roughly one and a half million acres of northern New Mexico, from the Rio Grande Gorge to the high peaks of the Sangre de Cristo range. The Latir Peaks Wilderness, the Wheeler Peak Wilderness, and the Pecos Wilderness collectively protect some of the highest terrain in the southern Rockies. At these elevations, the ecology shifts from ponderosa and pinon to spruce-fir forest, subalpine meadow, and above treeline, alpine tundra.

Taos Pueblo sits at the base of the mountains, eleven miles northeast of the town of Taos. The people of Taos Pueblo have lived in continuous habitation at this location for at least nine hundred years, and their relationship to the Blue Lake watershed, which drains from the peaks above into their ceremonial and agricultural life, was formally recognized by Congress in nineteen seventy when Taos Pueblo land was returned to the tribe after sixty-four years of National Forest administration. The return, which included around forty-eight thousand acres of watershed land, was the first restoration of federally held public land to an Indigenous tribe on grounds of religious and cultural significance.

The peak above the forest has been there longer than anyone has been counting. The name changes. The mountain does not.