A letter from a local
The light here ruined every other place for me.
Painters have been failing to capture Taos light for a hundred years, and every evening it gets free another shot at the Sangre de Cristos. The mountains go blood-orange, the sage flat turns silver, and the Rio Grande Gorge cuts a black line through all of it. You don't get numb to this. Seventeen years; checking in nightly.
Taos Ski Valley is the steepest, soulfullest mountain in the southern Rockies — a half hour up the canyon and still a place where strangers talk on lifts. Spring sends boaters into the Gorge's whitewater, and the high country opens five hundred miles of trail by June.
Town runs on art, solar, agriculture, and guiding — small, old, and layered in a way no resort town is. A thousand years of Pueblo history sits three miles from the plaza, and the town carries itself accordingly.
Come for a winter weekend: ski steeps all day, soak at sunset, green chile after. If the light off the mountains on the drive home doesn't move you, I can't help you.
— Marco