Some roads just get into your blood. After more than fifty years of making the drive from Santa Fe up through the Rio Grande Gorge to Taos, you'd think the magic might wear off a little — that the eyes would stop scanning the canyon walls, that the heart wouldn't still do that small involuntary leap when the road breaks over the rim and the Taos valley unfolds below you like something out of a painting. But it doesn't. It never does. And on a brilliant late-February morning, with a reason to head north and a camera ready, that old highway pulled me in all over again.
The errand was simple enough. My son Shannon lives up in Taos, and I had a few things to drop off. After breakfast I loaded everything into the Outback, pointed the nose north out of Santa Fe, and let the road do the rest.
A Winter That Forgot to Show Up
The first thing you notice this time of year — what you should notice but don't — is the snow. Or rather, the lack of it. We've had one of those warm, dry winters that New Mexico occasionally throws at you, the kind that leaves the high desert looking more like early April than late February. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, which normally wear a heavy white mantle well into spring, were showing a lot of bare rocky ridge and brown chamisa. Beautiful in their own stark way, sure, but a little unsettling for those of us who love this country and understand what snowpack means for the rivers and reservoirs come summer.
Still, a blue-sky New Mexico morning has a way of pushing those worries aside, at least for a few hours. The sky was that particular shade of cobalt you only seem to get above 5,000 feet — deep, almost electric — with wisps of cirrus stretched thin and high, backlit by winter sun. It was a day that made you glad to be alive, and gladder still to have somewhere to drive.
Velarde: Where the Gorge Begins to Work Its Magic
I've been stopping in Velarde for decades. This small village in the Rio Grande valley, tucked between apple orchards and the first serious canyon walls, has a quiet, unhurried character that feels increasingly rare. Velarde sits at the gateway to the most dramatic stretch of the Rio Grande Gorge, where the river begins cutting deeper through ancient basalt and the canyon walls start crowding in with real purpose.
Just outside Velarde, the land opens a clue to something much older than the highway or the orchards. The Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project protects one of the largest and most significant petroglyph sites in the American Southwest — thousands of rock carvings etched into the dark volcanic mesa by ancestral Pueblo peoples, many dating back centuries. Spirals, animal figures, geometric patterns, human forms — a whole cosmology hammered into stone, out there on the mesa edge above the river valley, largely unknown to the tourists rushing through on their way to Taos. I've hiked up there before, and if you ever get the chance, take it. It changes the way you see this whole landscape.
This time, though, I had a different project in mind. I pulled off the road in Velarde and spent a few minutes mounting my action camera on the roof of the Outback. I've been wanting to shoot a hyperlapse of this gorge drive for a while, and on a clear day like this, the light was going to be something. Camera locked down, I rolled back onto the highway and headed north into the canyon.
Into the Rio Grande Gorge
The Rio Grande Gorge is one of those geological wonders that never gets old regardless of how many times you've seen it. The river has been cutting down through this volcanic plateau for somewhere around 800,000 years, and in places the canyon walls drop 800 feet straight to the waterline. For much of the drive between Velarde and Taos, New Mexico Highway 68 hugs the canyon floor, winding right alongside the Rio Grande itself — close enough that when the river is running heavy, you can feel the energy of it through the window glass.
Through Rinconada the canyon tightens. It's a tiny community with a big canyon presence — a handful of adobe structures, old mining history, and walls of basalt that seem to lean over the road like they're having a look at whoever's passing through. The light here, bouncing off the dark rock and the pale river gravel, does something unusual. On a sunny morning it almost glows.
Then comes Pilar, one of my favorite stops in all of New Mexico. The village sits at the confluence of the Río Grande and the Río Embudo, and the Orilla Verde Recreation Area spreads along the riverbank here in a way that makes you want to pitch a tent and stay a week. The BLM manages this stretch of river as part of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, and it deserves every bit of that protection. Pilar is legendary among kayakers and whitewater enthusiasts — the Racecourse and the Taos Box sections of the Rio Grande are among the finest whitewater runs in the Southwest. But even if you're not paddling, just pulling off and watching the river work through its canyon is enough to set you right with the world.
The River Speaks
What I love most about this particular stretch of the Rio Grande Gorge drive is how the road keeps giving you glimpses of the river. You're not just paralleling it from a distance — you're right down in the canyon with it, the highway weaving and climbing and dropping as the rock dictates. There's a rhythm to the drive that feels almost conversational, like the landscape is saying something if you slow down enough to listen.
On this particular morning, the river was running clear and relatively low — no snowmelt yet to speak of, given the dry winter. That's both a blessing and a concern. The blessing is visibility: in low clear water, you can see every cobble on the bottom, every dark eddy behind a boulder, every riffle where the current breaks over submerged rock. I spotted a handful of ducks floating downstream around one of the broad bends — a pair of common mergansers riding the current with that effortless ease that waterfowl have, looking like they hadn't a care in the world. They probably didn't.
Over the years I've spent a lot of time scanning those canyon walls from this road. Eagles. That's what you're looking for, though you don't always find them. Bald eagles winter along the Rio Grande here in real numbers, and if you catch a mature bird perched high on a basalt ledge with that white head catching the morning sun, it's an image that stays with you. I've been lucky enough to see them hunting too — dropping low over the river, flying just a few feet above the water with those impossibly wide wings, hunting. On this trip I didn't see any eagles, but the looking is half the pleasure. Your eyes are always moving, always hoping.
The hyperlapse camera was doing its work up on the roof, and I found myself driving a little more deliberately through the best sections — slower on the curves, letting the canyon walls fill the frame, making sure the camera caught the moments where the river swings close to the road and the whole scene compresses into something almost cinematic.
Breaking Over the Rim
There's a specific moment on this drive that I've been trying to adequately describe for fifty years and still haven't quite gotten right. It happens as the highway climbs out of the canyon in the final miles before Taos — the road pitches upward through the last tight section of basalt, the canyon walls drop away, and then suddenly, all at once, you're out of the gorge and on the high plateau, and the world just... opens.
The Rio Grande Gorge continues winding north below you, cutting through the plateau toward Colorado, and you can see it from above now — that dark ribbon of canyon snaking through the sagebrush flat. To the east, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains rear up in a jagged blue wall, running north-south in that magnificent way they have, still holding some snow on the upper ridges even in a dry year like this one. And there at the foot of Taos Mountain, spreading across the valley floor, is Taos itself — the adobe rooflines, the green of the cottonwoods along the arroyos, the ski resort's runs cut into the mountain above town.
I still pulled over. I've pulled over at this spot more times than I can count, and I always will. You don't just drive past a view like that.
Taos Mountain — 12,305 feet of Sangre de Cristo grandeur — anchors the whole scene in a way that never lets you forget you're in genuine mountain country. The Taos Pueblo sits at its base, one of the oldest continuously inhabited communities in North America, and even from a distance there's a presence to this landscape that goes well beyond scenery. This is sacred land, old land, land that has been watched and tended and loved for a very long time.
Coffee with Shannon
Shannon picked a good coffee shop. We sat for a while, caught up, handed off the goods I'd brought from Santa Fe, and let the conversation wander the way it does when there's no particular hurry. Outside the windows, Taos was doing what Taos does — artists and ranchers and tourists mixing in that easy, slightly eccentric way the town has always had.
Eventually I got back in the Outback and pointed it south. Back into the gorge.
The Return Run
I've made this drive in both directions enough times to have a strong opinion: northbound through the gorge is dramatic and builds beautifully to the Taos reveal. But southbound has its own rewards. The light changes, the canyon looks different with the sun shifted, and heading south I give myself permission to stop for everything.
I stopped at Orilla Verde to watch the river for a while. The Pilar put-in was empty — too early in the season for the rafting crowd — and the river had that late-winter stillness that felt almost sacred. I shot some video of the water moving through a boulder garden downstream from the boat ramp, the kind of footage that probably looks like nothing to anyone but me and reads as everything.
There were more photo stops through the canyon — a particular bend where the far wall goes orange in afternoon light, a stretch near Rinconada where a lone cottonwood, still bare in late February, stood against the dark basalt like a charcoal sketch. The action camera had been running all day and I was curious what the hyperlapse would show — whether it would capture even a fraction of what it actually feels like to move through that canyon.
It won't. It never fully does. But that's the point of going back, isn't it?
The Road Keeps Calling
Over fifty years, this drive has been constant company through a whole life's worth of change. I drove it young and impatient, and I drive it now as an octogenarian with a camera and time to stop. The Rio Grande Gorge hasn't changed much. The river is lower than I'd like to see it in a dry February. Climate patterns are shifting in ways that worry anyone who's watched this country long enough. But the basalt walls are still standing. The eagles still come in winter. The road still winds along the water, and the view over the rim still hits like a revelation every single time.
Shannon was glad to see me. I was glad to make the drive. And somewhere up on the roof of the Outback, the action camera caught a few minutes of one of the finest scenic roads in America.
That'll do for a February Tuesday.
For more photography and video from the Rio Grande Gorge, the Sangre de Cristos, and the greater American Southwest, visit the New Mexico Outdoor Sports Guide and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Tags: Rio Grande Gorge, Taos New Mexico, New Mexico road trip, Velarde NM, Orilla Verde Recreation Area, Pilar NM, Sangre de Cristo Mountains, Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, Mesa Prieta Petroglyph Project, New Mexico photography, Southwest travel, scenic drives New Mexico
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