Rambling the back roads from town to town

Hoss and I are on a road trip. We have five days, a rented sport utility vehicle, an appointment with the late Georgia O’Keeffe, and a few million acres of vast, underpopulated, tinder-dry New Mexico waiting down the highway.

We have come for the unscrubbed Southwest of pre- and post-Columbian ruins, of towns with names like Wagon Mound and Cuba. We’re looking in the north, at a safe remove, I hope, from the density of Albuquerque and the designer adobes of Santa Fe. With some reluctance, we will pass through Taos.

We begin on a brilliant Monday. The earth is red and orange and, in the distance, blue. Dry winds rip through the sagebrush, and every time we exit the car, an atmospheric electrical charge jolts our fingers. The highest peaks of the Sangre de Cristos are thick with snow that will last into the summer.

Hoss is in the passenger seat because I called him a couple of weeks before with a question: Would he, a known gambler with time on his hands, like to join me on a travel-writing assignment through Las Vegas? He made affirmative noises, then I disclosed that this would be Las Vegas, New Mexico--see it on the map there, northeast of Albuquerque?

I am at the wheel, and shall remain so, because once our tickets were bought, Hoss disclosed that he couldn’t actually share the driving, because he’d been ticketed on a drive through New Mexico in the mid ‘80s. Now the warrant, unpaid, is 10 years old. I wouldn’t want him jailed, would I? It was about this time that I resolved to protect my friend the fugitive by nicknaming him Hoss for this story, without his consent.

Miles roll by. At a lonely, otherwise empty pizza joint outside Galisteo, we stop for meatball sandwiches, and Hoss confronts the counterman with a question seized from the dry, clear, blue sky:

“I’ve always wanted to know this, and, ah, it seems like you have time,” says Hoss. “How long does it take to cook a pizza?”

Five minutes at 560 degrees. Hoss’ curiosity is a vast and indiscriminate thing.

Shortly before sunset, we rumble into Las Vegas, a Las Vegas with 16,000 residents and not much doing on a Monday evening. In the main square, a pack of high school skateboarders take turns careening off curbs beneath buildings that are locked up tight.

They are handsome buildings. About 900 of them, in fact, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When the Santa Fe Trail emerged as the main trade route between Missouri and Mexico in the early 19th century, Las Vegas was the first city on the southbound route after hundreds of miles of unsettled territory. When Gen. Stephen Watts Kearney claimed New Mexico as a U.S. territory in 1846, he did so from a Las Vegas rooftop. Butch Cassidy tended bar here, we are told, and Doc Holliday pulled teeth, and Billy the Kid watered his horse.

We take a $44-a-night room at a site on the historic register, the 114-year-old Plaza Hotel. We inspect the Old West storefronts, and chat with bookseller Pete DuMont, a refugee from upstate New York who now runs the Bridge Street Books & Coffeehouse.

The next day, after an evening and morning of adequate food and lodging at the Plaza, we flee north, past Fort Union National Monument (where a goose unaccountably perches on the ruins of a 19th century adobe wall); through the tiny town of Wagon Mound; through the larger town of Springer. Passing the Philmont Scout Ranch outside Springer, we jerk to a halt and look on as a pack of jay-walking antelope, white tails bobbing, dawdle across the two lanes of State Highway 21, then bound easily over the 4-foot fence.

We follow a dirt-road detour past a conglomeration of half a dozen farmhouses, just so we can say we’ve seen Miami, N.M. We fall into conversation with the manager of a soon-to-open Sports Bar in Raton, and Hoss gets the guy to say he cooks his pizza for 13 minutes at 475 degrees. Hoss thinks maybe a theme is emerging for my story.

I think I’m ready for a hike.

Leaving the main road, we slip into Sugarite Canyon State Park, climb into the hills and wander for miles on the Ponderosa Ridge trail, until it becomes clear we’re never going to reach the top of that long, rocky ridge that rises from the scrub. We are defeated, but happily so--there’s all this clean air to breathe, and now we have burrs in our socks and dirt on our shoes to prove we’ve been somewhere.

Last stop for the day is the St. James Hotel in Cimarron--from outside, nothing special. But inside, we find worn red carpets, musty halls, sepia-toned photos, mounted animal heads and groaning floorboards. In the restaurant, one local rancher is warning another that someone’s bulls got loose today. It’s all so durned Western that I’m willing to forgive the place for its doodad-filled gift shop and its employees’ insistence on regaling us with tales of various alleged resident ghosts.

The St. James dates to 1873, when Frenchman Henri Lambert, formerly chef to presidents Lincoln and Grant, built a saloon to serve traders (and criminals) along the Santa Fe Trail. When business burgeoned, Lambert added a hotel in 1880, and in following years the property housed Black Jack Ketchum, Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Frederic Remington, Zane Grey--and a purported 26 homicides.

We sleep undisturbed and bear west the next morning through Cimarron Canyon State Park. The Cimarron River leads us through narrow gorges beneath slopes crowded with ponderosa pine and crowned by rock outcroppings. At the top of a long climb, the road bends and tips, and a dead calm lake lies before us. Beyond lies snow-topped Wheeler Peak, 13,161 feet above sea level.

About an hour later, after a side-road meander past high-country meadows and ghost-town ruins, we creep into Taos, just another tourist car in the midtown traffic tangle where U.S. Highway 64 and State Highway 68 intersect. Taos may be famous for being a sleepy, artsy retreat, but if the sun is up, it’s a good bet that at least a few, and perhaps several dozen cars are entangled in traffic by the T-shirt and curio shops of the plaza.

Can’t complain about the food, though. We gorge on blue corn chips, quesadillas with corn, salad with red raisins and walnuts, and much more at the Apple Tree Restaurant. Then we head a couple of miles south, and I enter my Georgia O’Keeffe phase.

*

It’s a baking late afternoon, and the 100 rooms of the Sagebrush Inn are beginning to fill. Two rumpled travelers--Hoss and I--barge into the lobby and assault the clerk with a series of historical questions. This place opened in 1929 with eight rooms, yes? Georgia O’Keeffe stayed here during one of her first trips to New Mexico about 65 years ago, yes? In the third-floor room with windows in all four walls? Yes, yes, yes.

The desk clerk warns that this is not the hotel’s most convenient room and suggests the first floor, but I not only insist, I ask the clerk to have a second bed, a rollaway, dragged up there.

Then we lug our bags up to 301 and find that there’s really no room on the floor for the second bed. In addition, three of the four windows look out onto the roofs of franchise outlets. And there’s a branch just outside one of the windows--every time the wind gusts, it squeaks against one of the building’s old exposed beams. There’s no quieting the squeak, and in this wind, it’s going to keep up all night.

We dial the front desk, where our call has been expected. Yes, we can move to another room.

*

Room 301 may not have been a good idea, but the Sagebrush Inn isn’t bad at all. With my AAA discount, the room on the first floor runs about $60. The public spaces are handsomely turned out in Southwestern artifacts and rustic woodwork, and we get free breakfast. Leaving, we roll up State Highway 68 to the big bridge a few miles outside town. There, we see the Rio Grande trickle through the shade of a 650-foot-deep gorge. Hoss spits from mid-bridge, and imagines what he could do with a golf club and a bucket of balls.

The bigger O’Keeffe adventure comes the next day, when we’ve made our way south and west to Abiquiu.

Abiquiu is the hamlet where O’Keeffe bought just under five acres from the Catholic Church in 1945. Her husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, died the following year, but O’Keeffe persisted, hired local families to help, and rehabilitated an 18th century adobe on a hilltop. She planted a rich garden around it, and worked and resided there part time for the next 40 years.

O’Keeffe died at age 98 in 1986. Her Abiquiu house and studio are now controlled by the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation, which is led by a board that includes the artist’s longtime assistant, Juan Hamilton.

They are an exacting bunch, the people who run this foundation. The home, which officially opened to visitors in 1995 after a few years of informal tours, is opened for limited tours three days a week, never more than six people inside at a time (to help preserve the building’s mud floors), at $20 a head. This summer’s tours are already sold out through September. Photography is forbidden, as is note-taking, unless you’re willing to sign a release. Oh, and one other thing, says the knowledgeable guide who meets me: “You are not to use my name.”

Fine. Led by Nameless Guide, I pad through a dwelling maintained largely as O’Keeffe left it, about 5,000 square feet of bare walls and bare floors offset by a rug here and there, a handful of O’Keeffe paintings and sculptures, a piece of modernist furniture, a rattlesnake skeleton under glass, a pair of antlers over a door, a Philco radio on the plywood kitchen table.

Right about now, I would expect Hoss to raise a sly question about the artist’s baking habits--any pizza dough in that kitchen?--but he’s already made his retreat. He’s down the hill, enjoying the food and shade of the stylish Abiquiu Inn, where we’ll be sleeping. Lunching, he discovers that the inn’s owners are Muslim; hence there is no beer, even on such a hot, dry day. All of a sudden, it seems, neither one of us is in the Wild West anymore.

Meanwhile, I am ushered through the artist’s modest bedroom, and stand a long while at the 25-foot-wide picture window in the artist’s studio. Twelve miles to the north sprawls the Ghost Ranch, where O’Keeffe maintained another residence (now off-limits). The rest of the ranch is run as an ecumenical retreat by the Presbyterian Church. But mostly, the picture window is sky, sand and rock.

“She didn’t make this up,” says Nameless Guide, scanning the horizon, thinking of O’Keeffe’s body of work. “I think that startles some people.”

That afternoon and the next day--our last day out--Hoss and I take on that landscape in a see-it-all driving binge.

First we dash north past O’Keeffe’s favorite red rock formations and up the Chama River Valley, leave the main road at the town of Tierra Amarilla, and halt in the tinier town of Los Ojos.

Los Ojos looks slow now, but in 1982, it was very nearly dead. In that year the non-profit group Ganados del Valle began the first of several civic resuscitation efforts drawing upon local resources. The foremost of those efforts, and the occupant of the most striking building on the main drag of Los Ojos, is Tierra Wools. We reach the front door just after closing time, but manager Tina Ulibarri sees us and re-opens to show off her stock, from $75 felt hats to a $1,100 hand-woven rug of many hues.

Doubling back, we head west from Abiquiu on State Highway 96; we breeze through Coyote, Gallina and Regina, then south on State Highway 44 through Regina, La Jara and Cuba. Hoss has an earlier flight out than I do, and we’re running a little behind schedule.

We rejoin the pavement on State Highway 4, spend about 12 minutes inspecting the 1,400-year-old cave dwellings of Bandelier National Monument. Then we turn south, racing through the shadows of Jemez Springs and past the rural jumbles of the Jemez, Zia and Santa Ana pueblos.

As dusk falls on Albuquerque, our grimy sport utility vehicle careens up the access road and jounces to a stop. Hoss’s flight is scheduled to leave in 20 minutes. Extracting bags from the back, we raise a minor mushroom cloud of fine red and orange particles, 1,000 miles’ worth of northern New Mexico dust. They were fine miles, but now the driver is weary.

Next trip we’re going to a state where I have warrants out.

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GUIDEBOOK: New Mexico Road Trip

Getting there: Reno Air and Southwest Airlines offer nonstop flights from LAX to Albuquerque, with cheapest, most heavily restricted round-trip fares beginning at $118, tax included.

Where to stay: In Las Vegas, the Plaza Hotel (230 Old Town Plaza; tel. [800] 328-1882 or [505] 425-3591) offers double rooms for $65-$110 nightly May 1-Oct. 31; rates fall 10%-15% November through April.

In Cimarron, the St. James Hotel (Route 1, Box 2; tel. [800] 748-2694) offers double rooms for $55-$100 nightly in its old building, $53-$80 in its newer annex.

In Taos, the Sagebrush Inn (P.O. 557, Taos, N.M. 87571; tel. [800] 428-3626 or [505] 758-2254) offers double rooms for $70-$130 nightly, breakfast included.

In Abiquiu, the Abiquiu Inn (U.S. Highway 84; tel. [800] 447-5621 or [505] 685-4378) offers double rooms for $45-$125 nightly. Upstairs art gallery.

Tours of the O’Keeffe house in Abiquiu: The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation’s May-October schedule--which is almost entirely sold out for 1996--offers hourlong interior tours, by reservation only on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays through October. Cost is $20 per person. Exterior tours, also an hour long, are offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4 p.m. Price: $15 per person. From November through April, interior tours are offered less frequently, and there are no exterior tours. Information or reservations: (505) 685-4539.

Programs at the Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu: Run under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church but in an ecumentical atmosphere, live-in weeklong seminars at the Ghost Ranch cover a variety of subjects including vertebrate palentology, folk art and hiking. Housing is rustic. Seminars take up 4 1/2 hours daily. Prices generally run $350-$500 per week, including room, board and tuition. Independent “rest-and-relaxation” stays are often possible at about $60 daily for room and board. Information: (505) 685-4333.

--C.R.