Arizona, New Mexico & the Grand Canyon Trips (Lonely Planet, 1st Edition) - Aaron Anderson [141]
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TIME
3 days
DISTANCE
205 miles
BEST TIME TO GO
Aug – Oct
START
Santa Fe, NM
END
Santa Fe, NM
ALSO GOOD FOR
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Beginning in the early 20th-century, writers from DH Lawrence to Mary Austin found their way to Santa Fe and Taos, finding freedom, inspiration and transformation in the dusty shadows of sunset mountains and the idealized communal culture of the pueblo people. Pack a notebook and pen, and follow in their footsteps.
One of the most influential characters of New Mexico’s literary parlors was Mabel Dodge Luhan, a writer and socialite from Greenwich Village, who arrived here in 1917. In her 1929 memoir, Luhan describes how the New Mexico sun “entered into one’s deepest places and melted the thick, slow densities. It made one feel good. That is, alive.” She moved to Taos, started a writers’ colony and married a man from Taos Pueblo. Her sprawling adobe home, in which she entertained Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Steiglitz and hosts of other artists, became home to Dennis Hopper (he reputedly wrote Easy Rider here) and is now the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. The inn, with kiva fireplaces and gardens, hosts regular writers’ workshops.
Luhan invited British author DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda to her writers’ colony, and in September 1922 they arrived in Taos. In 1924 Luhan supposedly gave them the 160-acre Kiowa Ranch in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Though the ranch itself is closed to the public, Lawrence fans make a pilgrimage to the DH Lawrence Memorial. As the story goes, when Lawrence died in 1930, Frieda was so determined to keep Luhan from spreading Lawrence’s ashes throughout the property that she mixed them up with the cement that was used to make the memorial’s alter.
Notorious in his day for his doctrines of sexual freedom, Lawrence suffered censorship and persecution for not only his writing but also his art. For $3, see his Forbidden Paintings, condemned as obscene and seized from a London gallery in 1929, at La Fonda Hotel on the Taos Plaza. After a peek at Victorian England erotica, walk a few blocks to the Moby Dickens Bookstore, stuffed with great Southwestern reads. Pick out a few to enjoy under the cottonwoods of Kit Carson Park & Cemetery, the final resting place of Mabel Dodge Luhan and Kit Carson.
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DETOUR
A couple hours east of Albuquerque on I-40 is Santa Rosa, birthplace of Rudolfo Anaya and the setting for the town created in his Bless Me Ultima. The Rudolfo Anaya Sculpture Garden, with a larger-than-life statue of Anaya and pages of Anaya’s books cast in bronze embedded in the walkways, is a must-see for Anaya fans.
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Taos resident John Nichols captured northern New Mexico in his 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War. Robert Redford filmed the 1988 movie south of Taos in the farming village of Truchas. From here, continue past the adobe churches, orchards and desert hills, past Española and up to Los Alamos. Author William Burroughs and Gore Vidal attended the Los Alamos Ranch School (1917–43), a boys’ boarding school; Burroughs was expelled for taking the hypnotic drug chloral hydrate. Check out the former school, now called Fuller Lodge, and peruse the nearby Los Alamos Historical Museum, with displays on the school, the Manhattan Project and the region’s natural history.
From Los Alamos it’s a 35-mile drive to Santa Fe. Before the tourists and the T-shirts, the malls and the whole foods, this was a dusty little town of adobe houses and afternoon siestas. Explore the city’s literary history on a walking tour with Storytellers and the Southwest. Santa Fe continues to attract authors, many of whom host gatherings at the Lensic Theater as part of the Lannan Foundation Readings and Conversations and book-signing events at Garcia Street Books and Collected Works. These small, independent bookstores boast an excellent selection of Southwestern literature.