Sunday, October 25, 2026
Sunday is starting cloudy and cool in Red River, near 37 degrees this morning after a 7:18 AM sunrise, with showers expected through the day, a high near 49, and sunset at 6:12 PM. Tonight rain is expected to change to snow showers as temperatures fall, and Monday should turn sunny with a high near 51. It is a good day for a slow Main Street stroll between showers, a warm drink, and a little town history, which in Red River is never more than a block or two away.
This valley was home ground for Ute and Jicarilla Apache people long before there was a town, and fur trappers and prospectors followed. Miners from nearby Elizabethtown were drawn in by gold strikes in the 1870s, and the camp first put on the map as River City grew around the stream that gave Red River its name. Hundreds of gold, silver, and copper mines were carved into the mountains, with names like Golden Treasure, Silver King, and Black Copper. By 1895 Red River was a booming mining camp with a population estimated at about 3,000, two newspapers, a sawmill, a blacksmith shop, hotels and boarding houses, a dance hall, a hospital, and more than a dozen saloons. Mining peaked in 1897.
The boom did not last. Gold fever faded, and by 1905 the population had dwindled to about 150, though the last serious mining efforts continued until 1931. What saved Red River was a second life that began while the mines were still closing: homesteaders outnumbered prospectors, and residents began renting abandoned mining cabins to flatland visitors escaping the summer heat and coming for the trout fishing. By the late 1920s and early 1930s the town was being called the mountain playground it remains today, and the opening of the Red River Ski and Summer Area in 1959-60 made it a four-season destination.
No single building tells that story better than the Little Red School House at the Y, where NM 38 and NM 578 meet behind the public library. Built around 1915 to replace the original log schoolhouse, which had been destroyed by fire, it served as a school until 1942 and is one of five buildings in town on the National Register of Historic Places. The building was moved in 1999 from its original location on the banks of Bitter Creek to its present site, where it now houses the Red River Historical Society. Its museum keeps a turn-of-the-century classroom and historic mining photographs, a small room that connects the mining camp, the homestead years, and the town that followed.
That continuity is the real Red River story: a community of about 500 year-round residents, completely surrounded by the Carson National Forest, that has reinvented itself without losing its past. If you are in the region today, the Taos Mountain Balloon Rally wraps up this morning on Albright Street in Taos, free and weather permitting. Looking ahead here at home, Red River's Halloween Carnival is Saturday, October 31, from 5 to 7 PM at the Red River Conference Center. Come for the scenery, stay for the stories, and take a moment at the little red schoolhouse that has watched over this town for more than a century.