A Taos winter - Taos, New Mexico - includes travel information

Sunset, Dec, 1999 by Dale Conour

When the snow falls, this New Mexico village offers fine art, inner peace, and outdoor excitement

It's a December afternoon and a harsh wind is blowing through Taos. I'm staring at the cold, implacable face of the famous pueblo, feeling underwhelmed. Hands dug into pockets, I try to discern signs of life behind the pueblo's dark windows. A voice escapes from a doorway: "Come in!" I can barely see an old woman leaning into view, her hand waving.

Inside she is rocking in front of a kiva harboring a cheery fire. She points out her son's jewelry work and tells me how fine the craftsmanship is and that (as fate would have it) it is on sale today.

The work has its charm: I choose a necklace of bears. The bears will bring luck, she says. "If my wife has bad luck, can I bring them back?" I ask. She laughs. As she slips the necklace into a plastic bag, she points out a photo of herself on the cover of an old Arizona Highways. I compliment her on the picture, and the day's commerce ends.

I return, reluctantly, to the outside, and I notice that the wind has lessened. The pueblo's face, so aloof before, is a warm bronze. The sun is lower and the light has changed, I realize, but I also think there's something more going on.

It's an unusual place, this village at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. Every Taos resident has a story about how he or she visited Taos and never left. They say there is a pull to Taos, an attraction that holds them here, forever.

Most visitors come in the summer, when the town is a base camp for hikers and mountain bikers, or in the fall, for the yellow aspens glowing against an impossibly blue sky. In winter, travelers normally pass quickly through on their way up to Taos Ski Valley.

But to understand Taos, travelers need to linger in winter, when the land's beauty is more elemental, when they must confront themselves in a place where even the smallest stones cast grand shadows. In winter it is easier to see that, as with all great destinations, Taos is an intersection of the road without and the path within.

"You can figure it out here"

I'm sitting on a bench in an octagonal room in the Harwood Museum. It houses an exhibit of works by artist Agnes Martin, who first showed here in 1947 and is now a permanent resident of Taos. Seven panels are suspended, one to a wall. They are nearly monochromatic, but crossed with pale bars of color that shift from foreground to background as I focus on them, drawing me deeper into the negative space.

This is the place, I realize, to begin an exploration of Taos, to capture the Taos mindset. "Agnes's work is meditative, and our landscape lends itself to that," notes David Witt, Harwood's curator. "It's the way people think around here."

Established in 1923, the Harwood is a stop on any cultural tour of Taos. It preserves works by the town's best-known artists, including the pioneers of the Taos Society of Artists.

How this hamlet in northern New Mexico was discovered by the Eastern cognoscenti begins with those pioneer artists. Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Geer Phillips were traveling from Denver to Mexico when their horse-drawn surrey broke down 20 miles from Taos. Blumenschein rode into town to get a wheel repaired and became captivated by the desert light, the pastel mountains. Blumenschein and Phillips joined four other artists to form the society in 1915, and the group achieved international fame.

Not long after, in 1917, New York socialite Mabel Dodge Luhan found her way here and began to draw many cultural icons out to her parlor, including Georgia O'Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence, who wrote of "something . . . unbreakable in the spirit of the place out here."

Today, Taos's appeal isn't obvious at first. From the main drag, the town is unremarkable, rough-looking. And yet this little village holds more than 100 galleries, museums, and bookstores (see "Taos Travel Planner," at right). As I explore them, I begin to understand what one gallery owner, Judith Kendall, says of Taos: "If you want to figure it out, you can figure it out here."

But Taos isn't all about metaphysical thoughts. There are more than coyotes howling on a Saturday night.

I stop in at Eske's Brew Pub. The crowd is noisy, the energy is high, and the green chili beer tastes pretty good once you've had a couple. After the warm-up, I head for the Sagebrush Inn, where R.C. Gorman prints and a large crucifix decorate the walls. On the dance floor below, the band's in baseball caps and the crowd's wearing cowboy hats. And eventually I loosen up and find my place there, two-stepping the night away before the eyes of Jesus.

And it becomes clear what the Sagebrush's lesson is. Every once in a while, you've got to let what's inside out.

Galloping into the wind

Late the following morning, snow begins falling on the sagelands of the pueblo. I'm on horseback, following my guide, Floyd Gomez (a.k.a. Mountain Walking Cane), an artist whose father, Stormstar, heads up the Taos Indian Horse Ranch. We are making our way through the brush and pinon at the foot of Taos Mountain.