October 31 arrives in Red River with frost on the boardwalks, the last gold holding in the canyon cottonwoods, and winter plainly on its way down from Wheeler Peak. It is a fitting date for this daily almanac, because the strongest story tied to this exact day is a Halloween when winter did not wait. Between October 30 and November 1, 1972, a storm buried Red River under deep snow and opened a legendary ski season.
Red River Town & Main Street
No single Main Street anniversary is verified for this exact date, so picture the season honestly instead. Red River began in earnest in the 1870s, when miners drawn by gold strikes built a camp first called River City, and by 1895 it was booming, with an estimated three thousand residents. Late October was the hinge of the year on Main Street: the fall trade was done, mines and mills were racing the snow, and every storekeeper knew the next wagon in might be the last easy one for a while.
Mining & the Gold Rush
This category does hold a genuine same-month anniversary. In October 1866, three soldiers from Fort Union — Larry Bronson, Pete Kinsinger, and a soldier called Kelley — were sent up Baldy Mountain to work the copper showing known as the Mystic Lode. While the others cooked, Kelley panned the gravel in Willow Creek and found gold. Winter was approaching, so they left, meaning to keep the secret and return in spring. The secret spread within weeks, the Baldy gold rush was on, and Elizabethtown, the first incorporated town in New Mexico, rose in the Moreno Valley below.
Founding Families, Characters & Legends
For this category, today offers a character to meet rather than an anniversary. Orin Mallette, one of the Mallette brothers who helped settle this valley, worked as a blacksmith on Main Street, on property adjoining the log cabin home of his brother Sylvester; New Mexico business directories list him there from 1905 to 1915. About 1894 he also established a brick kiln at the west end of the valley, firing soft, pastel pinkish-orange bricks for the boomtown. As far as is known, only one Red River structure was built of that brick, the Brigham J. Young House on Main Street, though Mallette brick went into chimneys around town.
Skiing & Winter
Today’s other Red River stories already told the modern ski school tale, so this section reaches back to an earlier, stranger opening. Local lore, retold by Fritz Davis in the Red River Miner, says Red River’s first attempt at a recreational ski area came before World War II, with a ski course and a horse-drawn tow. The little area opened on December 7, 1941 — the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked — and closed the same day it opened. With the modern ski area's opening day set for late November, that lost 1941 season is the right winter story for the weeks ahead.
Enchanted Circle Towns & Places
One Circle town does mark this exact date every year. Taos, at the southern end of the Enchanted Circle, holds its Downtown Halloween Community Event on October 31, when the fun spills out from historic Taos Plaza toward the John Dunn Shops and Bent Street, with trick-or-treating, carnival games, and a costume contest for children. It is a modern tradition in an ancient setting: Taos Pueblo, just north of town, has been continuously inhabited for nearly a thousand years, and the plaza below it has been the region’s gathering place for centuries. Halloween night belongs to the whole Circle.
The Land, Weather & Wildlife
Here is today’s lead item, kept to the storm itself. Between October 30 and November 1, 1972, snow fell hard across the southern Rockies, and in Red River it piled up eighteen to twenty inches in town, with thirty-six inches on the highest peaks — a Halloween trick-or-treaters here never forgot. The same system dropped fifteen and a half inches at Denver’s old Stapleton airport, with the heaviest snow there on Halloween night. One point old-timers are careful about: the famous five feet of snow was not this one storm. It accumulated storm by storm through November, and getting that detail right is part of honoring the memory.
Roads, Stage Lines & Travel
Late fall has always been a deadline on Circle roads, and a verified late-1916 project proves it. Before Eagle Nest Dam could rise in Cimarron Canyon, the road from Ute Park to Elizabethtown and Taos had to be diverted out of the canyon bottom, around the future construction site. Beginning in late 1916, about one hundred fifty men worked on that eight-mile diversion, according to the dam’s National Register nomination, and the highway was ultimately rerouted over McAvoy Hill, where U.S. 64 still climbs today. Crews pushed as winter closed in; once the snow flew, there would be no second chance.
Living History & Heritage
Heritage in Red River is not only behind glass. The town’s preserved landmarks still anchor daily life: the Little Red School House, whose sign dates the district school to 1913, and the log Community House, built by town residents and still a gathering place generations later. And the living tradition continues tonight, October 31, when families gather at the Red River Conference Center from five to seven in the evening for the free Halloween Carnival, the modern descendant of every schoolhouse social this valley has ever held. A small mountain town turning out together on a cold night is as old as Red River itself.
So October 31 in the Enchanted Circle holds a gold discovery racing the winter of 1866, a blacksmith’s brick still standing on Main Street, a ski area that opened and closed on a day the world changed, children filling Taos Plaza in costume, road crews beating the snow in 1916, and above all a Halloween storm in 1972 that old-timers still measure every winter against. Did you know Red River once measured its snow that way? Now you do — and the season that storm announced is just getting started.