A local printmaker is retracing the 1898 wagon route on foot this month, starting from the same stretch of road north of town where a wheel gave out and changed two painters' plans.
In the spring of 1898, Ernest L. Blumenschein convinced his studio-mate Bert Geer Phillips to join him on a sketching trip west. They outfitted a wagon in Denver and set out for Mexico. On the rough road through northern New Mexico, a wagon wheel broke. Blumenschein rode the wheel into the nearest town — Taos — to have it repaired, leaving Phillips alone with the wagon for three days.
Neither painter made it to Mexico. They sold the wagon, set up a studio, and stayed. By 1915 they were among the founders of the Taos Society of Artists, the group historians credit with starting the Taos art colony.
The road the wheel broke on is still, more or less, the way most people arrive in Taos.