This Taos Ski Resort Is Getting a Multimillion Dollar Upgrade

"Several decades ago, I was living with my future wife in Santa Fe, working as an editor at a magazine about outdoor sports. I would find myself sitting at my desk, cutting words and moving sentences, and entertaining the same daydream about seven times a day. In my mind I would trace the route north from Santa Fe as Sara and I drove up through high-desert scrub and the towns of Pojoaque, Espanola, and Velarde."

"I'd follow its wriggling path through the gorge of the Rio Grande until we shot out onto the mesa, the distant Sangre de Cristo Mountains lit tangerine by the ever-burning Southwestern sun. Somewhere among those peaks was the place I dreamed of: Taos Ski Valley. The origin story has it that in 1953 Ernie Blake, a Swiss-German transplant, flew in a little four-seater over northern New Mexico, spied the epic possibility in a steep, north-facing slope, then set to work, clearing and constructing."

A writer living in Santa Fe frequently daydreamed and made weekend pilgrimages north to Taos Ski Valley with his future wife, driving through high-desert towns and the Rio Grande gorge onto the mesa below the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Taos Ski Valley originated in 1953 when Ernie Blake identified a steep, north-facing slope and developed a ski area about 20 miles northeast of Taos beside Pueblo lands, merging European-resort influences with New Mexican culture. The mountain cultivated an edgy, countercultural spirit and offered demanding terrain such as snow bowls beneath 12,500-foot Kachina Peak that often required long hikes and rewarded skiers with airy powder.

Read at Travel + Leisure