Taos & Pagosa Springs

Don McIver
5 min readJul 9, 2022

I guess I wasn’t paying attention because on July 4th, I embarked on a trip that was much longer than I expected. I ended up taking off four full days from work. I have the time; I just didn’t know that was the plan.

I’m guilty of that, a lot. I let Mindy do the planning and then sort of balk about how much she has planned. I didn’t used to do this. I used to sort of script any and every trip with a list of things I wanted to do, but after multiple trips where I found I was having to negotiate every last detail I just sort of gave up. This is not to say that I haven’t done a lot in Taos already because I’ve lived in New Mexico now for thirty one years.

I don’t ski, but I’ve ridden a lot of the trails and hiked a lot of the trails close to town. Of the things I wanted to do this trip: visit the D.H. Lawrence Ranch and the Lama Foundation both were closed during the time I’d be there. Since it was the middle of the week even the brewery was closed. So much for doing anything new in Taos (visiting the brewery is not new btw).

It was really a warm up for a couple of nights in Pagosa Springs. Strangely, I’ve only driven through Pagosa Springs, so this stop in this town that is clearly designed around families was a surprise.

I did manage to get away from everybody and went into town to a Pizza/Taproom right on the main drag. You ordered the pizza like you were going through self-checkout in the supermarket. Then you’d pay the cashier. You’d also tell the cashier you wanted beer and they’d check your identification and give you “fob,” which is basically a sensor that deactivates the taps up to 32 ounces. There were about 20 different taps, but most of them were out and the few that weren’t seemed to be tapped as every beer I tried poured for a little bit then went to suds. What I ended up with is a pint that is composed of 4 different beers (a “suicide” beer if you will).

The result of mixing 4 different types of beer.

There are plenty of pictures of the town and the plentiful hot springs, but I didn’t really know that it was the gateway to the Weminuche Wilderness.

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Don McIver

Poet, writer, producer, monologist, rhetor, Dudeist Priest.