Pinos Altos. Photo by Carla DeMarco

"Pinos Altos? It's six miles north of Silver City on NM 15."

Most of the 300 residents of this mountain hamlet will say that far from being an appendage to Silver City, Pinos Altos is a distinctive community in its own right. Looking down on the larger city from an altitude of 7,040 feet, it is ten degrees cooler in the summer and ten degrees brisker in the winter.

Furthermore, Pinos Altos is the oldest Anglo settlement in the southwestern corner of New Mexico dating from 1860 when gold was discovered there.

Part of Pinos Altos' history is recorded in the cemetery. Here, shaded by twisted alligator junipers and upstart pinons, lie the first miners, killed by Apaches, or felled by disease and accident.

Tongues of mining waste lap down the sides of surrounding mountains, marking old mines such as the Golden Giant, the Hardscrabblel, the Hazard, and the Kept Woman. The names reflect the hopes, humor, and cynicism of the miners. Estimates of the value of gold taken from the district range as high as $810,000,000. No one knows how much unremarked gold has been mined.

In 1900, over a thousand people lived in the mining district. (Despite town plats and surveys and a post office dating from 1867, Pinos Altos has never

been incorporated as a town or village.) In those years, Pinos Altos boasted schools, boarding houses, stores and stamping mills.

This large population and the mills demanded fuel. All the trees were cut for miles around, denuding the mountains and drying up the streams.

After the rich claims were mined, Pinos Altos fell into somnolence for many decades. It awoke to find huge cottonwoods along the streams and the hills again green with ponderosas, the tall pines for which Pinos Altos is named.

Now, the old mining district is a quiet tourist attraction. Main Street looks much as it did in old photographs. As one German tourist said, "It's like walking into a western movie."

The Buckhorn Saloon houses what some call the best restaurant in three counties. The adobe Norton store, built in the 1870s, serves as the Pinos Altos Post Office and Ice Cream Parlor. The Pinos Altos Opera House, where melodramas are staged, and the three-quarter-scale version of the Santa Rita Del Cobre Fort are of more recent vintage. The Log Cabin Curio Shop and Museum occupies an early school building. The Hearst Methodist Church and the Catholic Church are in excellent condition.

Some visitors in Pinos Altos are on their way to see the Gila Cliff Dwellings or go for a hike in the Gila Wilderness. Others stay over at the Continental Divide RV Park or the Bear Creek Motel & Cabins and take time to explore the surrounding forest or visit the reconstructed arrastra (a primitive ore-grinding pit) north of the motel.

Pinos Altos is a history-filled mining district, with Silver City to the south and the 2.7 million acre Gila National Forest in all other directions.