The Red River Gorge Bridge in northern New Mexico doesn’t look like much until you’re actually on it.
I used to think bridges were just functional things—concrete and steel doing their job, getting you from one side of a canyon to the other without much ceremony. But this particular stretch of US Highway 64, where it crosses the Rio Grande Gorge about ten miles northwest of Taos, changed that for me. The bridge sits roughly 650 feet above the river, give or take a few feet depending on who’s measuring, and when you’re driving across it the first time, your brain does this weird thing where it can’t quite process the scale. The gorge itself is part of the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument, which means it’s protected land now, but for millions of years—maybe six million, the geologists argue about the exact number—the river has been carving through layers of volcanic basalt that erupted from vents in the Taos Plateau. It’s slow work, erosion. Patient. The kind of thing that makes you feel small in a way that’s honestly kind of uncomfortable.
Anyway, the Wild Rivers Recreation Area sits further north, where the Red River meets the Rio Grande. It’s a different kind of landscape there—less about the single dramatic view and more about the layered experience of descent.
The Part Where You Actually Have to Get Out of Your Car and Walk (Or Don’t, I Guess)
Here’s the thing about Wild Rivers: the trails down to the confluence aren’t particularly long, but they drop about 800 feet in elevation over a mile or so, and the way back up is—well, it’s the way back up. I’ve seen people underestimate it, showing up in flip-flops with a single water bottle, and you can almost predict how their afternoon is going to go. The La Junta Trail and the Little Arsenic Trail both take you down to the river level, where you can see the actual meeting point of the two rivers, which sounds more dramatic than it looks because rivers don’t exactly crash into each other like ocean waves. They just sort of merge, one greenish-brown current sliding into another slightly different greenish-brown current. But standing down there in the canyon, with the basalt walls rising up on both sides and the sound of the water doing its endless thing, there’s this quality of immersion—wait, maybe that’s not the right word—of being contained by geology that you definately don’t get from the bridge view.
The drive between these two spots takes maybe forty minutes if you’re not stopping, which you probably should be because the high desert landscape keeps shifting in subtle ways.
Colorado’s Red River Gorge—which is actually a different place entirely, and this is where things get confusing because people mix them up all the time—sits in the eastern part of Kentucky, not Colorado at all. I used to make this mistake myself until a friend corrected me, somewhat irritably, after I’d been talking about planning a trip to “the Colorado gorge” for about ten minutes. The Kentucky Red River Gorge is famous for rock climbing, with sandstone cliffs that have been weathered into these dramatic overhangs and arches, and it gets something like 200,000 visitors a year for the climbing alone. It’s a completely different geological story—Pennsylvanian-age sandstone instead of volcanic basalt, humidity and deciduous forest instead of high desert sage. But the name collision persists, and honestly I think it adds to the confusion about what “wild rivers” even means as a concept.
What the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System Actually Protects (And Why It Matters More Than You’d Think)
The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968 was one of those pieces of environmental legislation that seemed almost quaint at the time—protecting rivers for their scenic value, really?—but has turned out to be quietly important. As of now, there are about 13,000 miles of protected rivers in the system, which sounds like a lot until you realize that represents less than half of one percent of America’s rivers. The Rio Grande, where it runs through the Wild Rivers Recreation Area, was designated in 1968, part of the original eight rivers included in the act. What protection means here is mostly about limiting development—no dams, no channelization, no major alterations to the free-flowing character of the river. It doesn’t mean the river is pristine or untouched; cattle have grazed this area for over a century, and you can still see their impact on the vegetation and erosion patterns along the banks.
Driving back across the gorge bridge after a day hiking down to the river confluence, the late afternoon light does something particular to the basalt—makes it almost purple in places, deepens the shadows until the gorge looks like it goes down forever. It’s the kind of view that makes you want to stop, except you can’t really stop on the bridge itself without blocking traffic, so you just slow down slightly and try to hold onto the image, knowing it’s going to fade the moment you’re back on flat ground, thinking about dinner or gas prices or whatever comes next.
