Enchanted Circle
- Length: 84 Miles (135 kilometers)
- Duration: Three Days, Three Nights
- Elevation: 6,975 feet (2,127 meters) to 9,280 feet (2,995 meters)
By Michael Pitel
The year-round resort town of Angel Fire is the perfect introduction to the popular Enchanted Circle Scenic & Historic Byway. The picturesque loop skirts the base of a soaring mountain range crowned by Wheeler Peak, at 13,161 feet (4,014 meters) the highest-elevation point in New Mexico. It also visits the neighboring Vietnam Veterans National Memorial and passes through the fishing and sailboarding village of Eagle Nest, adjacent trout-teeming Eagle Nest Lake. Passing the ruins of the 1865 gold-mining town of Elizabethtown, it ascends 9,820-foot (2,995-meters) high Bobcat Pass, and drops to the year-round resort village of Red River.
Twenty-two circuitous miles (35 km) farther on, the byway passes the village of San Cristobal; less than five miles (eight kilometers) east of the village is noted British novelist-poet D. H. Lawrence's beloved Kiowa Ranch. Lawrence (1885-1930) lived there off and on from 1922 to 1925. Accessible by a dirt road, his log cabin home and his widow's wood-frame house are maintained by the University of New Mexico as writers' retreats; his ashes rest in an adjacent shrine that's open to the public.
Fourteen miles (23 km) farther south is the renowned art colony town of Taos. Founded in 1617, Taos became the birthplace of Southwestern art when the Taos Society of Artists was founded there in 1915. Today it boasts more than 60 art galleries, plus the Kit Carson Museum in the famed frontiersman's modest adobe home, where he lived in 1843-68; the restored, fortresslike adobe hacienda (1804) of wealthy Spanish merchant Don Antonio Severino Martinez; the home and studio of artist Ernest L. Blumenschein, a founder of the Taos Society of Artists; the sprawling home of art patroness Mabel Dodge Luhan, who once lured noted writers and artists like Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe to Taos; and the vast Indian and Southwestern art collection of Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers.
Nearby are multistoried Taos Pueblo (a World Heritage Site), and every winter, the challenging alpine slopes of Taos Ski Valley.
Leaving Taos, the byway snakes its way 18 miles (29 km) to the crest of 9,101-foot (2,776 meters) high Palo Flechado ("tree full of arrows") Pass, then plunges to the Moreno Valley below and Angel Fire, seven miles (11 km) away.
A tour of the byway, whose elevations range from 6,975 feet (2,127 meters) to 9,820 feet (2,995 m), is best done by overnighting the first night in Angel Fire, and the last two nights in Taos.
