New Mexico, new tourism
One of the poorest states in the US, New Mexico is reinventing itself as an eco haven, offering wildlife, adventure and stunning landscapes
The iconic Shiprock, a 1,700ft eroded volcanic plume in the northwest of New Mexico. Photograph: Tom Till /Alamy
New Mexico has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth. There are the high desert plateaux reaching for scores of miles into the blue distance; the iron-like clumps of mountain scarfed in cloud, their summits shimmering with ice; Alpine forests of fir, stands of aspen, mists of giant cottonwoods in the valley beds, and craggy peaks that burst from the flatlands.
New Mexico's ranking as the fourth-poorest state in the union has safeguarded it from industrial development and preserved its natural riches. And despite being so arid, this is a land defined by its waters – lakes, rivers, streams surging between volcanoes, meandering through broad valleys, plunging down gorges. And its wildlife is really wild: bear, elk, bison, wolves, mountain lion, eagles.
But some beautiful places are not just beautiful; New Mexico is good for the soul. People still come here, as they've been doing since the early 1900s, in search of a deeper meaning in their lives. There are dozens of religious and spiritual centres – some offshoots of the hippy days when the state was a nexus of counter-culture, some as traditional as the shrine of Chimayó, to which thousands of Catholic pilgrims walk through the desert each year. But perhaps the biggest draw is still the state's 19 traditional native Pueblo peoples, living on ancestral lands they have occupied for hundreds, even thousands of years. Nowhere else in America do people still live in ancient mud homes, and eat the corn and chilli their forebears grew.
New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, has just launched a new initiative to capitalise on these resources. "We're first in film, first in space, and now we're first in ecotourism," he says, referring to the tax breaks that have made New Mexico second only to Hollywood for movie production, and to Richard Branson's new "Spaceport", which is being built in the south of the state.
"We think traditional tourism is a thing of the past," he says. "The new traveller wants to do more than just visit a historic relic or city. They want a personal wilderness experience that includes wildlife, Indian Pueblos, and our landscape, our parks. We're constructing eco-lodges throughout the state that will offer river-rafting, wild horses, horse riding, our ancient cultures. At the same time, we're protecting the environment."
Ecotourism is not new here. When DH Lawrence came to New Mexico in 1921, he watched dances and ceremonies among Pueblos and tried to immerse himself in the consciousness of the local culture. And ever since the pioneer East Coast painters Blumenschein and Phillips broke their wagon wheel 20 miles from Taos in 1898, and decided to stay there rather than press on for Mexico, the state has drawn people to a low-impact lifestyle. But today there's a new edge: the Pueblo people predominantly practise sustainable living, while the Hispanic population has always built from local materials – adobe and trees. New Mexico is a state that has survived by safeguarding its past. Its traditional life, still visible, is intrinsically green.
Governor Richardson hopes the native community will be one of the big beneficiaries of his new venture. "This is good for them," he says. "This is clean industry." His heart is in the right place, but whether or not the Pueblos leap on board remains to be seen.
I teach Native American students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. They drive beat-up cars, live in dorms, have part-time jobs and get late with their assignments, just like other students. But there's a difference. Most of them still participate in tribal ceremonies where they may fast for days on end, shut up in a hot room (kiva) with their clan fellows, then dance for days in nothing but a few flaps of animal hide in freezing midwinter temperatures. From their point of view, mainstream western individualism is not just a delusion, but a form of hell. We strive for ourselves, not for cousin, brother, aunt. We live in competition rather than community, and treat the earth as a storehouse to be plundered.
One student's grandmother is the last surviving full-blood Mohawk. Another's great-great-grandmother was shot by Custer's troops. Pregnant, and almost due, before she died she managed somehow to give herself a caesarian, cut open the belly of a dead mare lying beside her, and place her infant inside it; Indian scouts who came through later heard the baby crying, and it survived.
Some Indians say the white man never was the enemy; the enemy was the sickness, the demon, that had possessed him, that caused him to be ever-hungry, unassuageable in his appetites. But there are native leaders who are seeking to lead their population into a healthy participation in national life. Bringing in parties of eco-tourists will be a step in the right direction.
In winter, the trunks of cottonwood trees look like tarnished silver candlesticks. From a distance, their dense thatch of twigs turns into a cloud of wire wool, a faint cupric green.
Nora Naranjo-Morse, a celebrated contemporary artist from the Santa Clara reservation, whose works show in museums around the country, lives in a grove of these giant trees. All around are her inventive works in clay and adobe – a field of small mud cones, lengths of adobe rope draped from trees, clay sculptures of iconic human figures, a megalith made from leftover adobe bricks from a new fireplace. "Our people have always worked with clay," she tells me, "whether fetching it from the river, or making or selling pottery."
Pueblos have their share of social problems, yet they also offer a vision to contemporary America of a deeper way of living – in connection with the land, with ancestral tradition, in a community. "A hundred years ago, all Indians had a collective consciousness," Nora says. "Today it's in transition. How do you contextualise what the native person is today?"
When you enter a reservation, you can feel it. It's a bit like going to Cuba, or an old communist country. Suddenly the endless grasping of consumerist capitalism drops away. There's a sense of rootedness, of no real need for things to be different – especially if you're there for a dance. Lines of semi-naked figures in elaborate masks and costumes of feather, fur, hide, with strings of rattling shells in their hands, are stomping up and down to the beat of drums that boom around the old mud walls. They'll move slowly round the central plaza in the course of a day, honouring each of the four directions.
Repetitive and monotonous, punctuated by the antics of a clown, the dances tend either to induce intense boredom in a spectator, or a meditative trance. The hills in the distance, the houses, the trees overhead, may all become part of the scene in a new way, as if they belonged together as cogently as the elements of composition in a movie still.
At some point in the day, whoever is currently the community's governor throws open his doors, and people stream into his house to be fed chilli stew, roast squash, corn and tortillas.
The Brazos Cliffs in northern New Mexico are from another world. Two billion years old, they rise up in 2,000ft of granite from pine-covered hills. Corkins Lodge, a ring of log cabins built in the late 1920s amid a grove of huge ponderosa pines, stands at their foot.
Corkins is a refuge from corporate America. Heated by stoves burning the deadfall from its forests, the place is intrinsically organic. You can taste the wilderness. There are mountain lions and enough bears that the garbage outside each cabin has to be locked up.
Today, in early spring, there are still cambers of old snow where it has slid off the cabin roofs. The breeze hisses in the trees constantly, like the sound of traffic in a city. (Ponderosas are like junior redwoods – incredibly straight and tall, the cracks in their filo pastry-like bark fragrant with vanilla.) Up on the cliffs, some crevices are filled with old snow, and below them the rock is black with snowmelt. Otherwise, the cliffs rise like blue smoke, like the towers on King Kong's island.
What is it about this place? All the pleasures are simple, elemental. You can clamber down to the river and dunk yourself in its icy water. In summer you can swim in a swimming hole between boulders as big as houses. You can hike paths through the ponderosas, fish for trout or sit by a stove, the scent of pinewood seeping through the cabin. And the sounds here – the river rushing below, wind soughing through pine needles, the cheeping of birds and chipmunks, the trees creaking – are all indigenous. Once a day, perhaps, it's disturbed by the distant buzz of a plane. New Mexican ecotourism is also about adventure. With his trademark beaver-felt 10-gallon hat, Cisco – or Francisco Antonio Miguel Niño de Ortiz Ladron de Guevara – is a character. Great-nephew of Pancho Villa's wife, he has been floating down the Rio Grande Gorge for so long he has virtually become part of its ecology. "I love the gorge," he says. "It saved my life."
Although it has almost killed him, too, he credits the river gorge with rescuing him from a life of crime and drugs. Wanted in three states in his wayward youth, one day he went up to the canyon rim, not sure whether to throw himself off, turn himself in or continue on the run. Then suddenly he heard ethereal voices singing Merle Haggard's "Lonesome Vagabond". The song described his life perfectly: on the run, wherever he turned. Was it angels singing about his future? Then he discovered powerlines beyond a bluff, which were somehow picking up the local country radio station. But the message was clear: he drove down to the nearest police station, turned himself in, did his time, then came out and slowly built up his business, Los Rios River Runners.
On a rainy morning a group of us would-be rafters climb into an old school bus and bounce past Taos's geodesic domes, bermed earthships, converted trailers, adobe shelters, and an old cop car painted in rasta colours, on our way to the Taos Box, a notorious string of rapids on the Rio Grande. As soon as we descend into the gorge there's a new quiet. The ziggurat-like cliffs, the flecked river silently rushing past, ringed with eddies, form a kind of hallowed precinct. The 17 miles we drift and surge are a floating wildlife tour. From mayflies turning like frigates on the brown surface to a golden eagle missing a feather – the gap clearly silhouetted against the sky as the bird turns and turns above us – we see all kinds of fauna in this arid land.
"How do you know it's a golden eagle?" I ask the guide, Eli, a gravel-voiced mountain man with a straggle of ginger beard. "See that grey rock under the cliff? The brown thing on top is a 6ft pile of sticks. That's their nest. Plus it doesn't have a white head, so it's not a bald eagle."
Half an hour and three miles of boiling, dirty-white rapids later, a peregrine falcon suddenly drops out of its glide, and shoots right down into the gorge, streaking silently past our shoulders. Then, up on a boulder field, seven wild bighorn sheep lift their heads to stare at us.
"Spaniards brought them over," says Eli. "They've been running wild 400 years."
There's bigger wildlife on the Chama Land and Cattle Ranch, owned by the Jicarilla Apache tribe. Pat, a man with impenetrable shades and a camouflage vest, takes me on a tour of its 36,000 acres, in search of roaming elk and buffalo. So far the only sign of buffalo has been the numerous tall piles of dung beside a row of trough feeders. Then we pass a herd of 60 elk, looking like giant, thickset deer, with a shaggy darkness about the shoulders like a mane.
The ranch mostly attracts hunters, but is planning an eco move into gun-free safaris. Meanwhile, its past is plain to see. The lodge's dining room is magnificently mock-baronial, while the hall is a veritable charnel house of skulls, skins and trophy heads. Bobcat, black bear, mountain lion, boar, javelina, wild goat – if it can be shot, its head is probably here.
Should you need to decompress after all the wilderness adventure, there's nowhere like Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs. With an old hotel that looks like a train station from 19th-century Mexico, the sprawling spa has a strange atmosphere, an almost cloying quiet. Perhaps this is the air of healing. The place has been drawing people since prehistoric times with its thermal waters.
This morning, four buzzards are turning in the sky. The sky here is like a sheet of steel. It's so hard. And the land is so soft – dusty yellow clay falling in pleats down the low cliffs above the old resort, from the foot of which 140,000 gallons of hot water surge up every day. If you wander on to the plateau above, you might find traces of the ancient people who lived here, drawn by the same hot baths. They called their village "the place of the green bubbling hot springs".
From up here you can see the entire skyline of the Sangre de Cristo mountains that bissect northern New Mexico. They form one long italic line filling half the visible horizon, glistening with distant plates of snow. Those mountains are perhaps New Mexico's greatest treasure. If things go the way the governor is hoping, they'll be preserved just as they are for a good few decades yet.
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