Taos, NM

Last updated 09/21/2018

We weren't sure what to expect from Taos. We had vague memories of things we'd been told; but people extolling the virtues of New Mexico tend to focus on Santa Fe, so we had some idea that Taos was quaint and charming, and that was about it.

The center of Taos was indeed quaint and charming in the classic New Mexican adobe-ish way. Their central historic section was full of art galleries, restaurants, and wandering tourists. It's quite likely that Taos is authentically quaint, meaning that it wasn't put together by a city council or chamber of commerce bent on bringing in more tourist dollars (see Laguna Beach or Newport Beach in California for design-by-commitee quaintocity). However, we've seen a *lot* of quaint towns in our lives, and Taos was just dutifully added to our mental list.

Tellingly, in going through our pictures while preparing this page (while in Idaho, three states later, if that tells you how far behind we are), we realized that neither of us had taken any pictures of Taos itself. The picture presented here is someone else's. (The attributions are embedded in the picture details.)

One thing should be said about quaint towns in otherwise rural areas, particularly out West where land is often more plentiful. The quaint part tends to be encircled by "suburbs" of wrecked cars, abandoned houses, overly-optimistic snow cone businesses long-abandoned, and tinder-try brush piles waiting to spark the next historic conflagaration. This is true of just about everywhere--Taos doesn't have any claim to fame in this less charming characteristic. In fact, Taos seemed to have quite a few very nice neighborhoods on its outskirts.

Still, despite the nearby skiing and the beautiful Rio Grande Gorge, neither of us felt particularly moved to move here. For one of us, it nudged the needle slightly north of Santa Fe...the idea being that if one were on the northern end of Santa Fe, skiing at Taos would be slightly closer, as would be Abiquiu Lake, which looks quite windsurfable.

Would we come back?

One of us would happily come back for skiing. We've toyed with coming back to try out Santa Fe in the winter, in which case a couple of ski trips to Taos from Santa Fe would certainly be in order.

Eagle Nest State Park. Our tiny trailer is directly above Ramona's index finger. It's not the more obvious white blob but the tinier white thing to the left of that.

Eagle Nest State Park is thirty or forty minutes outside of Taos and has no services at all, so it was "dry camping." In many ways, off-grid camping is much preferable to being crammed into some private campground where everyone has full hookups, but you are limited in how long you can stay off the grid. Eventually, water runs low, holding tanks fill up, etc.

We stayed at Eagle Nest State Park which is quite a few winding mountain-road miles outside of Taos, but was beautiful and well worth it. We kayaked on the lake and took way too many pictures of elk, mostly because they were the first elk we'd seen on our trip.

Also Eagle Nest... Alert viewers will notice something shiny in the front window of the trailer. That's a reflective mat we inserted in many windows in an attempt to keep cool--we had no shore power and therefore no A/C here. Fortunately, the park is at 8,300 feet, so it wasn't that bad.

Would we live here?

We might live near here. But Taos itself has lots of great art galleries at the expense of pragmatic things that make a place more livable for us (although to be fair, there was a nice natural foods store and the ever-present Walmart). The area has plenty of scenic attractions such as the Taos Pueblo, but tourist attractions are not, in and of themselves, a reason to move anywhere.

Totally gratuitous picture of Pippi wearing a hat!

Report abuse