New Mexico’s Lost Scenic Highways

Photo: QR AI

(Newmexicohistory.org) ... In 1914, Sunset Magazine described the Scenic Highway: Up the Canyon of the Santa Fe, over the nine-thousand foot Dalton Divide and down into Macho Canyon, several hundred gentlemen in black and white suits of a somewhat pronounced pattern are building a very remarkable road. It is to be called the Scenic Highway, and when it is completed it will form a section of the projected Camino Real from Denver to El Paso.
 It promises to be to New Mexico what the Sorrento-Amalfi Drive is to Southern Italy or the famous Corniche Road is to the south of France. By means of switchbacks - twenty-two of them in all - it will wind up the precipitous slopes of the great Dalton Divide, twist and turn among the snow-capped titans of the Sangre de Cristo range, skirt the edges of sheer precipices and dizzy chasms, drop down through the leafy solitudes of the Pecos Forest Reserve, and then stretch its length across the desert toward Taos, the pyramid-city of the Pueblos. Continued