We were going to New Mexico for a week, and hadn’t really planned on adding Colorado. If you look at the map though, the state line is only 60 miles north of Taos. We could be in the next jurisdiction faster than Bonnie and Clyde.
I kept vacillating though. I could spend weeks fishing Colorado. I could spend years fishing Colorado. There’s a seemingly infinite number of places to fish–famous places, the Platte and the Gunnison, the Eagle and the Frying Pan and the Roaring Fork. There’s the St. Vrain for goodness sake. Some of those rivers I’ve fished before, some I’ve wanted to fish, and some I still want to fish.
But truth be told fishing 50 states has taken a surprising amount of effort. By year’s end we hope to have added New Mexico, Arkansas, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Georgia, Iowa, and Wisconsin. We also fished in Delaware (I failed, Kris didn’t). That’s a lot of travel, and it still leaves 22 states. Meantime I keep googling trips to Belize, Mexico, and the Bahamas. I keep thinking I want to see Arles, France, and–heresy–not fish at all.
But in Southern Colorado there are a bunch of rivers I’ve wanted to fish. The Los Pinos, the Dolores, the Animas, and the Conejos are all great trout streams. I’ve never fished there but I’ve wanted to, so, last minute, we decided to make a side trip to the Conejos in Southern Colorado. We gave Colorado short-shrift, just to get it out of the way, but there are too many places in Colorado, and the Conejos is as interesting as any, and who doesn’t want to fish a river named rabbit?
All of our preparation for a side-trip to Colorado consisted of downloading Rocky Mountain High, and calling the first guide service that popped up on a Google search for the Conejos. We also listened to about half of The Stand on the drive out, but that was only because I couldn’t listen to the other Stephen King novel set in Colorado. I read The Shining a long time ago, and I saw the movie when it was released, and it still gives me the willies. I’m not doing that again.
So Colorado called out, “come and play with us,” and we did. Not forever and ever and ever though. Redrum.
We fished with Shane Clawson through Doc Thompson’s High Country Anglers in New Mexico, and Shane was great. There are several well-known guides in Northern New Mexico, and I delayed choosing because I couldn’t decide. I called Thompson because he’s Orvis-endorsed. Doc himself was booked, but Shane contracts with him–our good luck.
Covid hit guides in New Mexico hard. New Mexico did what other states should have done to get rid of Covid, but Shane’s business was shut for much of 2020. Later our Colorado guide told us that during 2020 he’d never been busier. Now New Mexico will get hit with the fourth surge like the rest of us, because we didn’t do what was needed.
I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroats in Latir Creek, and wanted to fish the Cimarron River. Ok, I’m lying. I told Shane that I wanted to fish for Rio Grand cutthroats in the Rio Costilla in the Valle Vidal, and that I wanted to fish the Rio Grande River. Apparently late July is too hot for the Rio Grande, so I picked the Cimarron because it’s not far from Taos, and because of the 1976 Poco album. I figured any day spent humming Rose of Cimarron is a day well spent.
As for the Valle Vidal, I had fished there once before, almost 25 years ago. We were on a family camping trip through Northern New Mexico—I promise, if I’d known my daughter had that tiny stress fracture, I wouldn’t have forced her to backpack into the Rio Grande Gorge. And she wasn’t carrying much besides her sleeping bag and some clothes. That and a couple of gallons of water.
Ok. I didn’t really make her carry any water. I made her little brother carry the water.
During that trip I stole an hour from my family to fish the Rio Costilla, and I remember the Valle Vidal as one of the prettiest mountain meadows I’ve ever seen. I didn’t catch anything, and Julie Andrews never sang, so I’ve thought ever since that I’d left something undone–at least for the fishing if not for the singing.
No luck though. The Valle Vidal is closed to fishing for two years for Rio Grande cutthroat trout restoration. Everything with gills in the Rio Costilla will be poisoned, and a pure strain of Rio Grande cutthroat will be reintroduced. Closing the Rio Costilla for two years to remove invasive species is absolutely a good thing, except of course that the two years is smack in the middle of when I finally decided to go back again to the Valle Vidal. Dang it. Dang invasive species.
Cimarron River
Except for the San Juan River, New Mexico doesn’t really have the fishing reputation of other Western states. It’s harder to get to, and except for the San Juan it’s not known for trophy fish. Most New Mexico rivers are small. New Mexican food is special, the mix of people is unique, and the art can be magnificent, plus there’s great high-desert scenery, but some of the best fly fishing is for some of the smallest fish.
Second things first. We fished the Cimarron the second day. It’s popular, and gear anglers are as common as fly anglers. We were in Cimarron Canyon State Park (elev. 7500 ft.) in Carson National Forest, on highway 64 between Taos (elev. 6969) and the town of Cimarron (elev. 6430), with considerable ups and downs thrown in for good measure. It’s a tailwater out of Eagle’s Nest Lake, but the river is still only 25 feet or so across, and that’s being generous. Because it was midweek, we had no problem finding space on the water.
With some detours for downed trees, the Cimarron is wadeable, and there are lots of wild browns. We started in the morning on San Juan worms under a dry dropper. It had rained, and Shane said he only fished worms while they moved in the soil after rain. Later we switched out the worms for small nymphs–WD 40s–still rigged under a dry dropper. Only one largish fish–maybe 12 inches and fat–hit the dry, and it had taken the nymph first and then just kept going. Our tippets were small, 5x, and leaders were short, 7.5 feet.
Cimarron River Brown Trout
The Cimarron was interesting, but the day before, the day we fished for cutthroat, was the reason I was there. I told Shane I wanted to fish for Rio Grande cutthroat. Shane misheard me, or maybe I misspoke. He heard I wanted to catch a Rio Grande cutthroat. I guess I did, but really, I just wanted to be in a high place that held cutthroat. If trout live in pretty places, cutthroat live in the prettiest places.
Latir Creek is part of the Rio Costilla drainage, so it’s not far from where I wanted to be. To get there we drove 45 miles north of Taos to Costilla (elev. 7700 ft), turned right on a paved county road that turned into an unpaved county road, then turned right again on a double track road that kept climbing until it petered out into a jeep trail. It’s a satisfying drive, and a drive that I thought justified that extra money for four-wheel drive, though to be honest we didn’t really spend any time on the jeep trail, and drove nowhere my father wouldn’t have driven a Buick LeSabre. Still. I’m manly. I have 4-wheel drive.
Mary Orvis Marbury, Royal Coachman Wet Fly, Favorite Flies and Their Histories, 1892, via Wikipedia.
If the Cimarron was small, Latir Creek was tiny. If I were a jumping man, I could have had a good day jumping back and forth across it. Not being a jumping man, we fished, sometimes from the bank, sometimes wading. Here’s the really cool part though: all day long I fished a parachute Royal Wulff, about a #14, which is like saying that all day long I played Ringo’s drums. It’s iconic, unmistakeable, a beautiful dry fly that floats on top of the water and that has a lineage back to the 1800s. It’s got its own Wikipedia page! Ok, what doesn’t, but still . . . . If I could spend the rest of my fly-fishing-life catching fish on a Royal Coachman descendant, I’d take that deal.
We caught rainbows and cutthroats; rainbows in the lower drainage, and then in the meadows and higher we caught cutthroats. All of the fish I saw were small, five or six inches, and their parr-marks–that’s a series of thumbprints extending down the fish’s body to its tail–hadn’t faded. Parr marks tell you that the fish are less than a year old. They also had the orange cutthroat on the Rio Grande’s lower jaw. I was happy as I could be to see those fish.
Shane wasn’t satisfied. In addition to the orange, on some of our fish there was a line of reddish iridescence–a rainbow–with the parr marks. Shane was concerned that the red line indicated that the fish were cutbows, rainbow-cutthroat hybrids. After the first couple of those, we moved further upstream (just verging on the jeep track), where hybridization was less likely.
Latir Creek Rio Grande Cutthroat
There wasn’t a lot of casting going on during all of this, not the kind of fine, artistic casting at which I am most likely to do injury to those around me and avoid the fish altogether. I would flick the leader a few feet forward in a half-assed roll cast, or just dap. What’s dapping? It’s not casting at all. It’s letting out just enough line to lay the fly on the water beneath the rod tip. Shane kept reminding me to take in more line. He said if I couldn’t make my cast (or in fact my dap), it was because I had too much line extended. By day’s end, I was fishing with only a few feet of leader extended from the end of the rod. It’s the earliest kind of fly fishing, say the mid-1300s, but the lies of the fish were so tiny, so pocketed into bits of soft water in the midst of a mad downhill rush, that nothing else worked. So there I was, happily dapping with a royal coachman for a fish that’s continuously declined in numbers and range since the 1920s. Don’t nobody ever tell me I ain’t hidebound, or at least nostalgic.
Even at the higher elevation, Shane was worried that our fish might be cutbows.
Latir Creek
When we met Tuesday Shane told us he’d spent Monday evening talking to other guides, who assured him that Latir Creek fish were almost certainly pure cutthroats. Apparently for parr fish it’s difficult to tell the difference by color, and other indications include the shape of the tail (rainbow trout caudal fins–tail fins–are square and not forked, while cutthroats’ are forked) and the place. I told him that he could have just told me they were cutthroats, that he didn’t need to spend all of his evening looking at pictures of fish tails on the internet, but he told me he wasn’t that sort of guide. I told him that I was that sort of client, but I really didn’t mean it. Cutthroat or no, I’d done what I wanted.
Spanish settlement in New Mexico dates from 1598, nine years before the English settled Jamestown and 22 years before Massachusetts got its Pilgrims. The Spanish had already been in and out of New Mexico for a while. Cabeza de Vaca wandered through about 1536 and Coronado came looking for Cibolo in 1540. Exploration was reasonably frequent after that.
The Spanish left for a bit too. After the 1680 Pueblo Revolt drove the surviving Spanish out, they stayed out for 12 years, but they came back and picked up where they left off. Permanent European settlement of the 50 States really begins with the Spanish in New Mexico.
Settlers’ arrival in 1598 was two years before the birth of Diego Velasquez in Seville, twelve years after the birth of Cervantes, and the year that Phillip III, King of Spain, ascended as Phillip II to the thrones of Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and to the Dukedom of Milan. The Spanish Armada had failed to invade England only ten years before, but that failure was more an act of God than of man. New Mexico was the furthest settled edge of one of the 16th Century’s most powerful and sophisticated nations.
El Santuario de Chimayo, Chimayo, New Mexico.
The Spanish settlers brought with them Catholicism, government structures, laws, language, and culture, including folkways and a debt peonage system for poor Hispanics and out-and-out slavery for captured Navajos that were every bit as inhumane as chattel slavery. Both outlived adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment by a decade.
Spanish communities persisted in isolation, preserving a culture with roots not in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Massachusetts, but in Spain and Colonial Mexico. Settlers adopted Pueblan crops–beans, squash, chilis, and corn were as important to the Hispanos as they had been to the Chacoans–but they also developed their own sometimes peculiar offshoots of Spanish culture–Los Penitentes come to mind, as does the possible existence of Crypto-Jews.
Jean Nicolas Du Tralage and Vincenzo Coronelli, Le Nouveau Mexique appelé aussi Nouvelle Grenade et Marata, avec Partie de Californie, 1687, The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections
In 1848 the United States took New Mexico from Mexico under the treaty ending the Mexican-American War. If they chose, then-Mexican citizens of New Mexico could either keep their Mexican citizenship or renounce it and become Americans. It was a mess. There were no real records of who renounced and who didn’t, and because Mexican citizens couldn’t vote or serve on juries, there were persistent questions as to whose vote counted. Some things don’t change. Questions of who was and who wasn’t a citizen persisted until statehood was finally granted in 1912, more than 300 years after the founding of Santa Fe.
The American conquest of New Mexico was deeply distrusted by both Mexicans and Indians. The invading Americans disliked the Hispanos’ language and religion. The Hispanos disliked the Americans’ language and religion. In 1847, the allied Taos Pueblans and Spanish New Mexicans violently revolted. The territorial governor, the trader Charles Bent, was murdered and scalped, along with just about everybody else in Taos holding office under the American government. When troops came to re-secure Taos, the rebels took sanctuary in the Taos Pueblo church, which was promptly leveled. In a strange mis-labeling, 28 of the rebels were hung for the crimes of murder or treason, though strictly speaking they weren’t American citizens and were being hung for committing treason against an invasion.
Ruin of the Taos Pueblo church, 1881.
As an attempt to understand this jumble of cultures and prejudices, I’m particularly fond of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop , and every few years will re-read all or parts of it. I always wonder how Cather arrived at writing about a French Jesuit New Mexican bishop. She was not New Mexican, she was not Catholic, and she was not French. It’s a novel with not so much of a plot as a progression, the fictionalized life of Bishop Lamy recounted in a series of episodes, but Cather’s themes, Catholicism at the church’s margins and the intersection of New Mexican cultures, still hold true, though these days there are fewer donkeys.
In addition to Spanish and Chacoan descendants, Navajo, and Apache, New Mexico also has Anglos. Of the roughly 2.1 million people in New Mexico, 36.8% are white only, 49.3% are Hispanic, 11% are American Indian, 2.6% are Black, and 1.8% are Asian. It’s not a populous state; by population, New Mexico ranks 37th. By population density, it ranks 6th, less dense than South Dakota, but denser than Idaho. It is a Western state.
Eastern New Mexico shares the Llano Estacado with the Texas Panhandle, and driving the 335 miles from Clarendon, Texas, pop. 1,842, elev. 2,733 feet, to roughly Santa Rosa, New Mexico, pop. 2636, elev. 4616 feet, is a lesson in humility, a spur to daydreams, and one of the great challenges to ownership of an electric car. The drive from Fort Worth to Santa Fe is 620 miles, about 12 hours, and, depending on your taste, it is either magnificent or hell, or maybe both.
Google Maps
It’s a drive I’ve made all or parts of hundreds of times, and I like it. The world changes west of the 90th meridian. Texas sheds more of its Southern heritage and becomes more Western, wet clothes dry faster, all those pesky trees are rarer–and in a lot of it trees just aren’t there. You can see mountains from Albuquerque, and there are mountains south around Cloudcroft and Ruidoso. The gaudiest beauty of New Mexico though is in the northern mountains, surrounding Santa Fe and Taos. Further west things generally flatten again, though it’s high desert, and certainly not flat by Llano Estacado standards. By the time you reach the far west of the state, Farmington’s elevation is 5,394 feet, Gallup’s is 6,468 feet, and even Anthony, just outside of El Paso, is 3,802 feet. Back in the Rockies near Taos, Wheeler Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is 13,167 feet.
In recent years, New Mexico has tended Democratic, but it switches between Republican and Democratic governors fairly regularly. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the state 48.26%, against Donald Trump’s 40.04%, but Gary Johnson, a home-grown Libertarian, received 9.3% of the 2016 vote (which probably hurt President Trump more than Senator Clinton). In a landslide, Joe Biden received 54% of the vote in 2020, and Trump stayed relatively flat at 43%. Oddly, while rural Eastern New Mexico lines up decidedly Republican, the state is not so clearly split between rural Republican voters and urban Democrats. There’s some of that, but some of New Mexico’s blue counties are decidedly rural. It’s almost as if the high country tends left, both geographically and politically. Maybe the Navajo and the Zuni vote blue. The Zuni are certainly mysterious.
KyleReese64, New Mexico 2020 Presidential Election map, Wikipedia.
Both United States Senators from New Mexico are Democrats, and both houses of the New Mexico legislature are controlled by Democrats.
So what about New Mexico Anglos? For 13,000 years, New Mexico has been a settlement magnet, and Anglo-Americans are just the arrivistes. American traders out of Independence, Missouri, first opened the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 to reach New Mexico silver. That makes Anglos a bit later than the Navajo and the Spanish, but even the Anglos are closing in on two centuries.
National Park Service, Santa Fe Trail
What do New Mexicans like about Texans? We visit and then get out. We’ve invaded New Mexico twice, once under the Republic of Texas (while New Mexico was controlled by Mexico), and once during the Civil War (while New Mexico was controlled by the Union). Both invasions were disasters. Now Texans just go to New Mexico for vacations, or maybe to retire, which is a kind of extended vacation.
What do New Mexicans hate about Californians? They come and then they stay. California stuff has proliferated, and now it’s a lot easier to find a good yoga class, or a cute restaurant, or decorative coyotes. Are there still decorative coyotes? I’ll have to check.
Millicent Rogers, 1940s, Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos. This image is almost certainly copyright protected, but is used under the fair use exception. I hope so anyway.
My friend Darrell used to insist that Santa Fe was a town run by rich women. What did he mean? I never knew, exactly, but it’s a statement I’ve pondered–Darrell rarely says things that aren’t worth pondering–and I think I kinda know. The culture of Northern New Mexico was shaped in part by women like Georgia O’Keefe and Millicent Rogers. It’s loaded with museums and opera and of cute and very expensive fine and traditional art galleries in Taos and Santa Fe. Oh sure, there are normal everyday folk in New Mexico. Still, it’s the influx of art beginning in the 1920s that’s so much a part of New Mexico’s appeal, and that gave women space to shape the culture. After New York and Los Angeles, Santa Fe is the States’ third largest art market. Maybe I just made that up, but the notion feels right: New Mexico is one of those places where not just manly industry but feminine high culture has its say.
Maybe that’s what Darrell meant, or maybe he just meant that the Santa Fe city council was stacked with rich woman. Maybe it’s all just sexist drivel. I’m not sure.
Beyond high culture, New Mexico is also poor. It’s per capita annual income, $23,683, ranks 47th among the states. Out there among the decorative coyotes, there’s real poverty. New Mexico’s alcohol-related death rate is the highest in the nation, and is highest among Native Americans. Española, New Mexico, a largely Hispanic town of 10,044 near Santa Fe, is regularly ranked as one of the most violent communities in the nation. In 2017, the violent crime rate in Española was 644.86% higher than the national average. Traveling the 30 miles to Española from Santa Fe, you can turn right to go to Chimayo, left to Abiquiu and the San Juan, or continue northwest to Taos. You can’t get many places north of Santa Fe without going through Española, and there are plenty of places in the north worth going to. Española, maybe not so much.
My father first visited Santa Fe, in 1945. He was 22, an Army Air Corp flight officer stationed at Kirtland AFB as the war wore down. He borrowed a car and drove north until the road dumped him into the Santa Fe plaza. I suspect there was more to Santa Fe than he remembered, but he found a parking place on the Plaza, which may be the last time any tourist did.
From our West Texas home, I spent plenty of time in New Mexico growing up, and then more time later. Along with the the fine roads into the Rockies, the architecture, the cool summer nights and pleasant days, the smell of piñon, the inhabited Pueblos and the uninhabited Anasazi ruins, the clear cold water, the high desert, it was, and is, beautiful.
I caught my first trout in New Mexico, and my second and my third. Kris and I honeymooned in Santa Fe, and it was the first time I’d been to Santa Fe in the winter. Later, one late night driving down a washboard road to Chaco Canyon, my rearview mirror fell into my lap. In the village of Cordova, in a modest home off the high road from Santa Fe to Taos, I bought an unpainted hand-carved Santo of St. Michael and the dragon. As I left, the señora–she seemed ancient–gave me a small home-grown apple almost as wizened as she was. I was driving and camping, de-toxing after the bar exam, and had been backpacking for a few days at Bandelier National Monument. I probably smelled a bit ripe. I think she suspected I was spending my last dollars on her family’s carvings, and like as not I was. I still have the St. Michael bulto. Even more, I still have that apple’s kind intent.
Sammy Cordova, Cordova, N.M, St. Michael and the Dragon, 1984.
I joke that there are two kinds of Texans: Texans who love Santa Fe and Texans who love New Orleans. I’ve grown to like New Orleans well enough, but my heart is always with New Mexico. I have spent a lifetime pondering it, appreciating it, wishing I was there. I have never spent enough time there. I never will.
Beyond its physical beauty, there is no state where disparate cultures have coexisted for so long, or have been so studied, or have so preserved their own identity. There is a Navajo joke about the typical Navajo family consisting of a mom, a dad, four kids, and an anthropologist. Our country’s most irksome mystery, the 12th century disappearance of the complex pre-Pueblan cultures at and surrounding Chaco Canyon, reaches us after an earlier archeological progression of hunter-gatherers, basket-weavers, pottery makers, complex builders, farmers, hunters of mega-fauna . . . All traceable through a rich legacy of physical remains. People paint onto the abandonment of Chaco (or Mesa Verde, or Keet Seel, or any of the others) their own predispositions, whether they’re prone to the wacko or the scientific, whether they believe in alien invasions or ecological disasters; the mystery of the abandonment is large enough to accommodate and in their mind validate their notions, however peculiar.
I have a duffer’s understanding (maybe misunderstanding) of New Mexican Indian history. In the east the culture was Plains, Comanche and Kiowa I think, not so different from West Texas, and as far as I know none of that culture survives there except as artifacts. Along the Rio Grande and to the west there are 19 remaining Pueblos, dating from more than 1,000 years ago and reduced from the 100 or so inhabited Pueblos when the Spanish arrived. These are our country’s oldest continually settled communities. The remaining Pueblos are certainly (but somewhat mysteriously) connected to the abandoned pre-Pueblan sites, though they are divided among Keresan, Tewa, Hopi, and Zuni language groups.
The Navajo and Apache were relative latecomers, and speak a closely-related Athabaskan language. They arrived in what is now New Mexico and Arizona late, in the 1500s, and the Apache remained hunter-gatherers. The Navajo changed. They borrowed from everybody–they made pots, they built stone defensive structures, they farmed, and after the Spanish arrived they stole sheep and became nomadic shepherds. They even borrowed religious practices from the Hopi, the Hopi being top-notch at getting rid of witches. Among both the Pueblos and the Navajo witches are commonly believed to be a source of many of the world’s evils.
The Navajo seem to know how to absorb: not always, not too much, but plenty enough for us to recognize and identify with their relative plasticity. The Zuni, the most remote and traditional of the Pueblan cultures, will remain mysterious to almost everybody but the Zuni, precisely because of their adherence to tradition. Navajo culture on the other hand makes a lot of sense. After all, every Navajo family has its own anthropologist.
Stella Chavarrio, Santa Clara Pueblo, carved jar, 1984.
Through the 19th century, the Navajo fought with everybody–the Utes in Colorado and Utah, the Pueblo settlements, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and then the Americans. They didn’t completely appreciate the concept of property ownership, and all of those other folk were kinda like the supermarket. When in August 1846 during the Mexican-American War, General Kearney led American Troops to take Santa Fe from Mexico, the occupation was extremely unpopular, but at least at the time it was bloodless. Among other things, Kearney promised to end Navajo depredations. He didn’t. The Navajo pretty much did what they wanted until violent and destructive campaigns in the 1860s forced many of the Navajo to walk nearly 300 miles to the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner in Eastern New Mexico. The exile to Bosque Redondo, the Long Walk, was a brutal disaster, and is still a bitter memory among the Navajo. In 1868 the Navajo were allowed to return to their traditional lands.
The territories of the Utes and the Navajo were divided by Western New Mexico’s most certain source of water, the San Juan River, John the Baptist River, or in Navajo Są́ Bitooh, Old Man River. The San Juan feeds into the Colorado, and before it was dammed it was broad, slow, and muddy. It was a catfish river, and still is in its warmer parts. In its colder parts every fly fisher knows the San Juan. In Pennsylvania, sitting with a group of anglers at a picnic table at Fisherman’s Paradise, someone asked where we’d go next. I said I thought New Mexico. Two people immediately offered that they knew where we could fish in New Mexico, the San Juan. It’s now one of the Southwest’s glamour rivers, a clear, cold, nutrient-rich tailwater offering big trout for even the most incompetent. Being among the most incompetent, I’ve fished the San Juan a few times, and it deserves its reputation. We won’t go there.
