Follow the Enchanted Circle Scenic Byway around its 84-mile loop of the high Sangre de Cristos and you will pass through some of the most storied ground in northern New Mexico. Few travelers realize that at one stop on that loop, the whole town is standing on a ghost town.
Taos Ski Valley is famous today for steep expert runs, Kachina Peak's 12,481-foot summit, and the European-flavored village tucked beneath Wheeler Peak's long shadow. But in the 1800s this same valley floor held a small copper mining town, and its story ends with one of the most expensive mistakes in New Mexico mining history.
The first version was called Amizette. Established in 1893 as a small mining district working copper, gold, and silver lodes, it was abandoned by 1895 — a life of barely two years, even by boomtown standards.
The second version arrived a decade later and spent far more money to fail. Around 1902, prospector William Frazer discovered copper and gold in the canyon east of the old townsite, and he persuaded New Jersey banker Albert C. Twining to back him with a staggering $300,000 investment in a smelter. The town was renamed Twining in the banker's honor.
The smelter never worked. On its first firing, the molten ore froze to the sides of the furnace, sealing it into a useless hulk. Bankruptcy followed, and the townsite was abandoned by 1910. A fortune had been poured into one building, and one firing had killed it.
Twining sat empty for decades. Then, in 1955, Ernie Blake — a Swiss-German skier who was managing the Santa Fe Ski Basin — spotted the valley from his Cessna 170 while flying between the two ski areas he helped run. He and his wife Rhoda acquired the old Twining site and began building a ski mountain. The first lift, a J-bar, went in during 1956. For a time Snakedance was the resort's only slope; a second lift followed in 1957. The Blakes started out living in an eleven-foot camper beside the nearly finished Hondo Lodge, and they had no electricity until 1963.
Two dreams unfolded in the same canyon. The miners of Twining came for what was underground and lost a fortune on a smelter that froze on its first firing. The Blakes came for what was underfoot — steep, consistent snow in a remote setting — and built a destination resort on the very ground where the mining town had died. Today virtually no trace of old Twining remains, and the Enchanted Circle carries skiers past it every winter, most of them never knowing what lies beneath the lifts.
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