Community Events

Some historic places ask you to look through glass. The Red River Community House, at 116 East Main Street, asks you to come in, join in, and stay a while. That invitation is not new. It is more than eighty years old, and it is still being renewed every week by the families who walk through the door.

Every mountain town has a room where the night comes together — and in Red River, for generations, that room has been the Motherlode. At 406 Main Street, the saloon with the big stage, the big dance floor, the pool tables in the back, and the front porch for watching the evening go by has been the town's honky-tonk through every era of its modern life.

Twenty-five miles north of Taos, in the center of the village of Questa, stands an adobe church that has been testing its community's devotion for nearly two centuries. San Antonio de Padua — Saint Anthony of Padua — anchors a parish whose roots reach back to the first years of the settlement the Spanish called San Antonio del Rio Colorado.

Before Red River was a ski town, before it was a tourist town, it was a mining camp — and mining camps needed schools. Around 1917, a small one-room schoolhouse rose in Red River, and for the next two decades it rang with the lessons and laughter of the town's children.

Long before trout became a Red River pastime, they were a Red River product. A hatchery has stood in the valley near Questa since 1941, and today the Red River State Fish Hatchery produces about 1.7 million rainbow trout a year — more than the state's four other hatcheries combined. It is the largest production hatchery in New Mexico.

For four decades, Memorial Day weekend meant one thing in Red River: thunder. The Red River Memorial Day Motorcycle Rally — one of the oldest in the nation — drew tens of thousands of bikers to Main Street and kicked off the town's summer season with a roar.

When Oklahoma oil man Stokes Bolton rolled into Red River in the 1950s, the town counted barely a dozen year-round residents. He had never skied a run in his life. What he had was an entrepreneur's eye: the steep, snowy slopes rising above town looked like a business waiting to happen. In 1959 he opened the Red River Ski and Summer Area with a rope tow, a poma platter lift, and a chairlift cobbled together from salvaged oil derricks — and a ski town was born.